In an early scene in the film “Just Mercy,” death row inmate Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian, wearing a white jumpsuit, sits across the table from his lawyer Bryan Stevenson, with the sterile bars of an Alabama prison in the background.
“You don’t know what you’re into down here in Alabama,” McMillian, played by actor Jamie Foxx, tells Stevenson, played by Michael M. Jordan. “Here you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.”
McMillian then storms out, leaving Stevenson bewildered. He later tells the lawyer that, to White neighbors, “I look like a man who could kill somebody.”
This scene and the entire film pack a gut punch, telling the evocative true story of a man wrongfully arrested in 1987 for the murder of a White teenager and the lawyer who got him off death row. Stevenson freed many death row inmates after he set up the Equal Justice Initiative, a center for the legal representation of such inmates, in 1989.
Early in the movie, Stevenson finds that the only evidence against McMillian is the dubious testimony of a lone witness, a string he pulls until the whole case unravels.
Unfortunately, this story – and others like it – seems like a realistic portrayal of the biases that plague America’s legal system, said criminal justice scholars.
Since 1989, more than 2,500 people have been exonerated following wrongful convictions. Since 1973, 166 people have been released from death row. Research from the Death Penalty Information Center shows that 42% of death row inmates are Black, even though African Americans make up only 13% of the U.S. population.
