He hath shown thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? -Micah 6:8
Just Mercy is based on the lives of two black men: Harvard-educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan), who started the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative. The organization was designed to provide free legal assistance to death row inmates, far too many of whom could not afford a lawyer to effectively represent them when they were charged with the most serious of crimes. Walter MacMillan (played by Jamie Foxx) is one of those inmates. Driving home from work one night, he was arrested for the murder of an 18-year-old girl he had never met, then spent a year on death row before his trial ever started.
"Around here, we are born guilty, and just wait until the white folks decide what the crime is," one of MacMillan's neighbors tells Stevenson, and I guess many Native readers of this magazine understand that feeling all too well. The case against MacMillan (known to his family and friends as Johnny D), is based on one very unreliable witness (played by Tim Blake Nelson), who made multiple contradictory and nonsensical statements in his testimony. The more Stevenson digs into the case, the clearer it becomes that the Alabama county that arrested Johnny D was looking for a scapegoat more than they were interested in catching a murderer.
Capital punishment is a passionately debated topic in both America and Canada, especially in Christian circles. Many will quote Old Testament passages prescribing death for certain crimes and proclaim that we should base our laws on those laws. They argue that in God's eyes, the appropriate punishment for murder is death.
Just Mercy does a solid job of showing that, while that may be true, our justice systems are too broken and corrupt to assume the awesome, terrifying responsibility of final judgement. We are fallible human beings, prone to error and bias even on our best days. God is the only truly impartial, all-knowing judge, and in 99 cases out of 100, only God really knows what happened, who is guilty, and why.
This movie validated my opinion that the death penalty is (among other things) a cultural sin of arrogance, verging on blasphemy; we assume the judgment seat of God Almighty-and in doing so, according to the words of Jesus, bring judgment on ourselves. If we are to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, we must be very careful that we do not condemn innocent people to death-as we have done, far too many times. At times we are killing people, not because they have committed a terrible crime, but because they are too poor to afford a halfway decent lawyer. This, brothers and sisters, should not be.
Just Mercy comes at a moment in our culture when there is more interest in examining the unjust and violent ways black, indigenous and people of color are treated by our justice system. Many platforms, including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Netflix have made this movie available to watch for free. I'm thankful for that and recommend everyone watch it, because this is a discussion that we desperately need. At the same time, it is a pretty straightforward film about this issue, and cinematically isn't that different from films like Hurricane, A Time to Kill, or To Kill A Mockingbird (it's ironic that MacMillan was arrested in Monroeville, Alabama, which was one of the towns that the town of Maycomb, Alabama, in To Kill a Mockingbird was modeled after. This is a fact the white district attorney is very proud of, even as he fervently, doggedly prosecutes a black man for a crime he knows he didn't commit). The courtroom is a naturally dramatic place; that's why we see it so often in movies and TV shows.
Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx both give excellent performances, as does Brie Larsen, who plays Stevenson's assistant; they are clearly very invested in this material and bring a spirit of vitality to the film that it desperately needs. Still, on some level, I wish Cretton had found a fresher way to approach the Stevenson's book, or perhaps had focused on Stevenson's 30-year career defending death row inmates instead of this one case in particular.
Johnny D's story is important, without a doubt, and this is an important movie, but there are times when it feels overly familiar, when the next scene is pretty easy to predict. The story of a justice system that is systemically built to persecute black and indigenous people is, sadly, a pretty well-worn path in cinema-as it is in life.
Find a discussion guide for the movie at https://participant.com/film/just-mercy
Will Krischke lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with his wife, Megan, and two children. He works for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship as the Area Ministry Director for the state of Oklahoma, and his wife is Intervarsity's Director of Native Ministry.
