CHAPTER & VERSE — Just Mercy

Rufus McCrae: Evening, you lovely lot, and welcome to Chapter and Verse, my reading group down the pub, where tonight the jukebox is broken and, according to this book, so is the entire American justice system. Round the table: Old Jim Calhoun, who brought tonight's book and has sat on more Southern porches than most Southern porches. Vivian Hale, who has counted the American prison population twice this week and doesn't like either answer. Arthur Nightingale, who read the last hundred pages on the night bus and made the driver pull over. Alice Pemberton, here to tell us whether a book by a lawyer reads like a book by a lawyer, God help us. The book is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson: a young lawyer, an Alabama death row, and a man who should never have been on it. And up in the balcony, where they've been since before the building was, Humphrey Thwaite and Mortimer Finch.

Humphrey Thwaite: Since before the building. I'm seventy-eight, Rufus, not load-bearing.

Mortimer Finch: You are a bit load-bearing, Humph. Take you out and the bar falls over.

Humphrey Thwaite: A book written by a lawyer. I assumed I'd be billed for it in fifteen-minute increments.

Mortimer Finch: He finished it in two nights. Wouldn't let me turn the big light off.

Rufus McCrae: Right then. Jim, it's your book, so if it's rubbish it goes on your tab. You've spent fifty years collecting the stories small-town America tells about itself. Why this one?

Old Jim Calhoun: Because it opens in the one small town every reader on earth thinks they already know, Rufus. Monroeville, Alabama. Harper Lee's hometown. The place that gave us Atticus Finch. And in the late nineteen-eighties, while that town is proudly celebrating a novel about a Black man falsely accused, it goes and falsely accuses a real Black man. Walter McMillian. Sends him to death row for a murder he did not commit. Stevenson points out the irony himself, quietly, and then he just lets it sit there and rot. I've heard a lot of Southern stories. I have never heard one with a worse punchline.

Humphrey Thwaite: We did Mockingbird. I said Atticus was a saint in a three-piece suit and nobody listened.

Mortimer Finch: You said that about the vicar. He was wearing a cardigan.

Rufus McCrae: Vivian, you've had a face on since Jim said death row.

Vivian Hale: I've had a number on, Rufus. He puts it right up front: America went from about three hundred thousand people in prison in the early seventies to two point three million. And then the one that's lived in my head all week. For every nine people executed in the modern era, one person on death row has been exonerated and released. One in nine. If a bridge had that failure rate you wouldn't call it a bridge. You'd call it a river with ambitions.

Mortimer Finch: A river with ambitions! I'm having that. I'm putting that on my headstone.

Rufus McCrae: Alice, you're our reader's advocate. Numbers like that, a lawyer writing it. Does it actually read, or is it homework?

Alice Pemberton: That's the sneaky genius of it. I was braced for a worthy legal memoir, footnotes, a stern photograph on the back. Instead it reads like a thriller. Three in the morning I'm sat up in bed shouting at a judge called Robert E. Lee Key.

Mortimer Finch: Behave. That's not a real name.

Alice Pemberton: Entirely real name, Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: You couldn't put that in a novel. Your editor'd send it back with a note saying, bit much, love.

Humphrey Thwaite: That's the trouble with real life. Nobody edits God.

Rufus McCrae: And what did His Honour actually do, Alice?

Alice Pemberton: The jury convicts Walter, but they recommend life. And the judge overrides them. Turns life into death, with a signature. Alabama let judges do that. That's the moment I put the book down and made a cup of tea I didn't want, just to go and stand in a different room for a minute.

Rufus McCrae: So who is this fella, Jim? Because he does not sound like your usual brief.

Old Jim Calhoun: He isn't. Born nineteen fifty-nine in Milton, Delaware. Poor, rural, and he starts out in a segregated school for Black children, because desegregation took its sweet time reaching his corner of the world. His grandmother was the daughter of people who'd been enslaved, and she's the first voice of the whole philosophy of the book. He quotes her: 'You can't understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.' That's the engine. Everything he does after is a man taking his gran's advice.

Humphrey Thwaite: And then he goes to Harvard. Very close to the struggle, Harvard.

Mortimer Finch: Oh, here we go.

Humphrey Thwaite: I'm only saying.

Old Jim Calhoun: And he says himself he felt lost there, Humphrey. Didn't know why he'd come. Then in nineteen eighty-three he takes an internship in Atlanta with a little outfit defending people on death row, and almost straight away they send him, alone, a law student, into a Georgia prison to tell a condemned man one thing: you won't be executed in the next year. That's the whole message. He's terrified. He apologises for not being a real lawyer. And the man, Henry, about his own age, is so relieved they end up talking for three hours.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur, you're always first to feel these things and you've gone misty already.

Arthur Nightingale: Because of how it ends, Rufus. The guards come in and shackle Henry too tight, roughly, on purpose. And Henry closes his eyes and starts singing a hymn. 'I'm pressing on the upward way, new heights I'm gaining every day.' Being dragged off in chains, and he's singing. Stevenson walked out of that prison knowing what he'd do with the rest of his life. You don't get conversions like that any more. Not without a donkey involved.

Mortimer Finch: There was a donkey on the road to Damascus?

Arthur Nightingale: There was a donkey everywhere, Mortimer. It was the Bible.

Humphrey Thwaite: Fine. Fine. It's a good hymn. That's all I'm saying, it's a good hymn.

Mortimer Finch: He's welling up and we're not even on the soft bit yet. Vivian, say something cold, quick.

Vivian Hale: Happily. Here's what he built with it. He founds the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery in nineteen eighty-nine. Tiny, broke, taking cases nobody else will touch. And it scales. He ends up arguing at the Supreme Court, and in twenty twelve, Miller versus Alabama, the Court rules that mandatory life without parole for children is unconstitutional. From a student shaking in a visiting room to changing what a country is allowed to do to a fourteen-year-old. That's not a career. That's a compound interest chart.

Rufus McCrae: There's the bit with the copper as well, isn't there, Jim?

Old Jim Calhoun: There is. Young lawyer, already doing death penalty work in Atlanta, sitting in his own car outside his own apartment, listening to Sly and the Family Stone. Police pull up, shine a light, and one of them draws a gun on him. On his own street. The man who'll go on to argue before the Supreme Court, held at gunpoint for sitting in a car listening to funk.

Mortimer Finch: Sly and the Family Stone. Only crime there is good taste.

Rufus McCrae: And it's not a clever lawyer's anecdote, is it. It's the whole book in one bad night. Go on then, Jim. Walter. Give us the man.

Old Jim Calhoun: Walter McMillian. Mid-forties, ran his own pulpwood business, cutting timber, doing all right for himself, which in that county in those years was already a bit suspicious if you were Black. And he'd had an affair with a white woman, which the town knew about and did not forgive. November nineteen eighty-six, an eighteen-year-old called Ronda Morrison is murdered at the dry cleaner's where she worked. Months go by. No arrest. Pressure building. And they pick Walter.

Humphrey Thwaite: On what?

Old Jim Calhoun: On the word of a man called Ralph Myers, who had every reason to say whatever the sheriff wanted him to say. Meanwhile, on the day of the murder, Walter was at home, hosting a fish fry. Dozens of people saw him there.

Mortimer Finch: Dozens of people at a fish fry? That's not an alibi, that's a congregation.

Old Jim Calhoun: And not one of them counted, Mortimer, because of who they were. Here's the bit I still can't get past. They put him on death row before his trial. Fifteen months, waiting to be tried, living alongside men being walked off to the electric chair.

Humphrey Thwaite: Before the trial.

Old Jim Calhoun: Before the trial.

Humphrey Thwaite: That's not a justice system. That's a waiting room with a gallows at the far end. Alice, tell me they got him out.

Alice Pemberton: They did, but Stevenson makes you feel every inch of it. He takes the case after the conviction, and it's this slow, maddening grind. Appeals, evidence that was never handed over, Myers finally recanting. And in nineteen ninety-three the state gives up. Six years on death row, and Walter walks out. Arthur's about to cry again, I can see it.

Arthur Nightingale: I'm not. Well, I am. But what I loved is he's never a symbol. Walter's funny, he's proud, he's stubborn, he's a bit of a grump.

Mortimer Finch: Finally. Representation.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur, you've been holding that book like a hymnal all night. Go on.

Arthur Nightingale: Near the end. Years on, Stevenson's on the phone with a man called Jimmy Dill, not long before Jimmy is executed, and Jimmy has a terrible stammer, and he's trying and trying to thank him. Afterwards Stevenson sits there and decides he's done. He wants out. And then he writes this. … 'We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.' … And a little further on. … 'I don't do what I do because it's required or necessary or important. I don't do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I'm broken, too.'

Mortimer Finch: … Yeah.

Rufus McCrae: Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: Ten pages, I always say. You know in ten pages if a man's honest. That's the page that proves I was right about him.

Rufus McCrae: Alice, you've been down the Goodreads mines for us. What's the damage?

Alice Pemberton: Small damage. It's one of the most loved books on the site, so the one-star crowd is a little, cross minority. But they're consistent, and I'll give you the gist straight. One: it's repetitive. Case, outrage, injustice, next case, outrage. Two: it's one-sided, we only ever hear from the defence. And three, the structure. Walter's story runs right through the book, but every other chapter Stevenson cuts away to another case, a child, a woman, a disabled man, and readers say he keeps leaving just as it gets good.

Humphrey Thwaite: The third one's fair. I'm on the edge of my seat with Walter, and suddenly I'm in a different prison with a different man. Felt like being made to change at Crewe. Go on, Jim, defend him.

Old Jim Calhoun: That's the argument, Humphrey. If he told you only Walter, you'd close the book thinking, well, one bad sheriff in one bad town. He cuts away to show you it's the same machine in every county. Vivian, back me up.

Vivian Hale: And as for repetitive, honestly. If it's tedious to read about the twelfth child sentenced to die in prison, imagine being the twelfth child. The repetition is the data.

Humphrey Thwaite: The Goodreads people want a book about the death penalty with a bit more variety. Perhaps a musical number. A tap routine on the last mile.

Mortimer Finch: Humph's on the side of the defence. Somebody mark the date on the dartboard.

Alice Pemberton: To be fair to the grumblers, the cover doesn't help. Desmond Tutu on the jacket calling him 'America's young Nelson Mandela.' You open it braced for a saint, and some readers resent being told who to admire before page one.

Rufus McCrae: Which brings us to the one Humphrey's been sharpening his knife for since the crisps came out.

Humphrey Thwaite: Here's my trouble, and somebody's going to throw a pint at me. Walter's innocent. Of course you want mercy for an innocent man. That's not mercy, Rufus, that's arithmetic. The title says Just Mercy and the book leads with the easy case. Arthur's going to tell me I'm wrong.

Arthur Nightingale: Because you are. It doesn't stay with the easy case. Herbert Richardson.

Humphrey Thwaite: Go on, then. Vivian, you've got the file.

Vivian Hale: Vietnam veteran, badly traumatised. He leaves a homemade bomb on the porch of the woman he's fixated on, some broken plan to rescue her and win her back, and a little girl picks it up, and it kills her. Guilty, no question. Executed in nineteen eighty-nine, and Stevenson is with him on his last day.

Humphrey Thwaite: And I want to hear from that child's mother. Where is she? He gives the man a chapter and a hymn, and the dead girl gets a handful of lines.

Arthur Nightingale: That's not fair.

Humphrey Thwaite: It's precisely fair. It's the one thing it is.

Rufus McCrae: Alice, you're shaking your head so hard your earrings are in danger.

Alice Pemberton: Because it's a memoir by a defence lawyer, Humphrey. It's not a public inquiry. Nobody reviews a prosecutor's memoir and complains he wasn't nice enough about the defendant.

Humphrey Thwaite: Then don't call it Just.

Rufus McCrae: Jim, you've got your finger jammed in a page.

Old Jim Calhoun: Because this is the line he'd answer you with, Humphrey. It's in the introduction. 'Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.' He's not saying Herbert didn't do it. He's saying the worst day of a man's life shouldn't be the only thing the state ever bothers to know about him.

Humphrey Thwaite: Easy to say when the worst thing wasn't done to you.

Mortimer Finch: Humph.

Humphrey Thwaite: I mean it.

Mortimer Finch: I know you do. But here's what my gut says. He keeps telling you when he loses. Herbert dies. Jimmy dies. A con man doesn't tell you about the ones he lost. And Vivian's got a graph coming, I can feel it in my knees.

Vivian Hale: No graph, just the system. Alabama's judges are elected. And Stevenson's point about override is that judges turned jury life sentences into death far more often than the other way round, in a state where looking tough wins elections. Alabama finally abolished judicial override in twenty seventeen. That's not about whether Herbert's sympathetic. It's about whether the machine was built to want blood.

Humphrey Thwaite: I'll grant you the machine. I will not grant you the title.

Rufus McCrae: That's the most anyone's ever got out of him. Somebody chalk it on the board behind the bar. One thing you're taking home tonight. Vivian, you're the numbers. Give me something that isn't a number.

Vivian Hale: It's his line, but it's a number in disguise. 'The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.' I've spent my whole life measuring outcomes, and he rewrote the balance sheet in one sentence. Rich people aren't the opposite of poor people. Fairly treated people are.

Rufus McCrae: And what's the porch telling you, Jim?

Old Jim Calhoun: Get close. That's his grandmother's line, and it's the oldest advice in every story I ever collected. You can hate a whole category of people from a hundred miles away. It's a lot harder to hate a man who's just told you about his fish fry.

Rufus McCrae: Gentlemen. Last orders.

Humphrey Thwaite: I'll say this, and then I'm going to the gents. There's a line near the end. 'Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving.' … I'm old. I've been forgiven things I had no business being forgiven, by people who were well within their rights to keep the receipt. … Not one of them was deserved. That's the only kind that ever did me any good.

Mortimer Finch: … Mind the step on your way, Humph. It's undeserving as well. Mine's the fish fry. Not the cells. Not the chair. A man in his own yard with his friends, frying fish, and the state came for him anyway. … Everybody in this pub thinks it couldn't be them. That's what Walter thought. That's the book.

Rufus McCrae: Just Mercy. It repeats itself, and it never pretends to be fair to the prosecution. It's a closing speech, not a judgment. It's also the best closing speech I've ever heard. Every pub I've ever drunk in, there's one fella the landlord lets run a tab he'll never pay, because the landlord's heard his story. That's mercy, near enough. Stevenson's asking a whole country to hear the story first. Read it if you've ever said lock 'em up and throw away the key. Read it before you say it again. Me, I keep thinking about Henry. Shackled too tight, eyes shut, singing about higher ground to a frightened kid who'd never set foot in a prison. And the kid listened. Read the actual book, though. Don't just listen to us bang on about it. That's Chapter and Verse. See you next week.