Bryan Stevenson’s quest for change in Just Mercy

Have you picked up a copy of my most recent release yet? Hot on the Trail Mix, #15 in the Auntie Clem’s Bakery series is now available!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

I have been fascinated with reading Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. It is full of amazing and heartbreaking stories of injustice, with lots of details about the changes in the law over the decades, statistics, and how these changes to the justice system have worked or not worked to the advantage of the poor, marginalized, and disadvantaged.

I was struck within the first few lines of Just Mercy about the similarities between it and Grisham’s A Time for Mercy, which I just finished reading. Both are about young lawyers working on innocence projects and getting people off of death row. Both are filled with a number of different stories of how people were unjustly sentenced to death within a system that punishes the poor while letting the rich go free or get off on much reduced charges.

Then I reached the point in Just Mercy where the narrator describes going to see Charlie, a young teen boy who has been charged with murder. Grisham’s book centers around his Jake Brigance character’s defense of a similar boy. The more Stevenson revealed about the circumstances about the case in his book, the more similar they were. Each the story of a small, shy teen who shoots his stepfather who is passed out in his bed…