COMMUNITY
Just Mercy: A Love Song to
Lawyers
JONATHAN RAPPING Atlanta’ s John Marshall Law School jrapping @ johnmarshall. edu
18 NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2025
Everyone loves a good story. Take them to a sinister place that is populated with villains. Include a sympathetic target of the evildoers’ mischief who has been subjected to a grave injustice. Introduce a hero who saves the victim from their plight; returns them to their grateful family and community; and causes the bad guys to begin to understand the error of their ways, foreshadowing a better world in the future.
This is the narrative at the heart of the movie, Just Mercy. The setting is Montgomery, Alabama where the criminal justice system is infected by racism, classism, and indifference to the Constitution. The antagonists are the police and prosecutors so hellbent on closing a murder investigation that they railroad Walter McMillan, ignoring powerful evidence of his innocence. The hero is Bryan Stevenson, who forgoes the comfort and fortune he could enjoy with his Harvard law degree to move
to Alabama to fight for those society has deemed discardable in seemingly hopeless post-conviction litigation. Stevenson is ultimately able to win McMillan’ s release and return him to his grateful family, while simultaneously opening the prosecutor’ s eyes to an injustice he has long refused to acknowledge.
The lure is even greater knowing that Montgomery, Alabama is a real place; Walter McMillan is an actual victim of a terrible injustice; and Bryan Stevenson is a genuine hero who has devoted his life to fighting injustices as grave as the story featured in the film.
Viewers who are not students of criminal justice will likely leave the theater with a sense of triumph. They may mistakenly believe the story is unique; a singular tragic episode that has been remedied, allowing the spectator to breathe a sigh of relief and feel good about the outcome. However, those who toil in this space understand this narrative is far from exceptional. Injustice like this is routine. The film provides an opportunity for those of us committed to transforming the legal system to educate audiences about the fact that this story is more like the rule than the exception.
Sadly, criminal justice systems that disproportionately impact people based on race and class are the norm. Eighty percent of those arrested qualify for court-appointed counsel and all else being equal a Black person is more than five times more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterpart.
Regrettably, judges and prosecutors in these systems routinely facilitate the status quo and can often be quite inhumane while doing so. Racial disparities are revealed in arrest rates, charging decisions, and sentencing severity. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of people who are presumed innocent are sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial simply because they cannot afford bail. A significant number of these people are accused of non-violent offenses. Recent reports issued by the Department of Justice last year revealed that prisons and jails in my home state of Georgia routinely violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But while inhumane, and sometimes deadly, conditions in prisons and jails plague systems nationwide, it is rare to find a prosecutor or judge who considers this when locking away people living in society’ s margins. Fortunately, there are many heroic lawyers sacrificing greatly to resist the injustice that has been so normalized in these places. I know this. I have been working with them for the past two decades.
Twenty years ago, I moved to Georgia- after spending a decade as a public defender in Washington, DC- to help