While this story takes place in Monroe County, Alabama, the Confederate flag in the bar frequented by the sheriff and his friends is a reminder that the past has not been buried-not then, and if we are to believe the recent controversies over the flag, not even now. Tragic as it may seem, McMillian’s story is par for the course in old Dixie. The depictions of police hostility are facile, as most police officers do not resemble the bad apples shown here nevertheless, the viewer automatically identifies with the victim and his intercessor, and activist lawyers like Stevenson are presented as doing the Lord’s work. The status quo does not want to be upended by an intruder.Ĭretton does a good job of showing us how a corrupt establishment is able to pervert the course of justice through false testimonies and hysteria. His journey is far from rosy: he, too, is stopped and intimidated by the police. Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Stevenson has moved to Alabama to establish the EJI and bring justice to African-Americans in the rural Deep South. Jordan), an African-American man of a different social status. Eventually he finds himself wrongly convicted of a murder he never committed, and languishing on death row. Initially polite with the officers, he realizes they have already made up their minds about him. The county promotes its “progressiveness” as the home of Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a 1960 novel about the wrongful conviction of an African-American man.Yet we soon learn that not much has changed–racism is still the de facto law of the land.ĭriving home one night, Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), a middle-aged African-American tree feller, is stopped by the police for no apparent reason. The film takes us back to the beginning of Stevenson’s career in Monroe County, Alabama in 1989. Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) based in Montgomery, Alabama, has dedicated his career to overturning the wrongful convictions of African-Americans in the southern United States. Guilty until proven innocent: that is the “justice system” presented to us by director Destin Daniel Cretton in this cinematic adaptation of Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
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