Just Mercy | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Phoebe Judge: Hi, it’s Phoebe. We’ve wanted to sit down with Bryan Stevenson for a long time.
He’s been working with inmates on death row for 30 years, and has seen a side of the
criminal justice system few of us can. Doing this show for the past couple of years, we’ve had a lot of time to think about many
of the issues he deals with every day. So today, maybe something a little different: the interview I had with him a couple of weeks
ago. Here’s the show. Bryan Stevenson: You know, there’s no humane way to kill a fully healthy human being, someone
who is not physically ill, without trauma, without suffering. It’s not just the method of execution.
I’ve been with people in the hours before and execution and it is — it can only be
described as surreal. Phoebe Judge: The first time Bryan Stevenson met someone on death row, he was a Harvard
Law student. He’d been struggling in law school — he says he didn’t really like Harvard and he
didn’t even know if he liked the idea of being a lawyer. But then he got an internship with a group called the Southern Prisoner’s Defense Committee,
and they sent him, all by himself, to a maximum security prison outside of Atlanta to deliver
a message to an inmate. Bryan Stevenson: And they said, “Just explain to him that he’s not at risk of execution
anytime in the next year.” And I was so convinced that he would be disappointed to meet someone who was just a law student,
I tried to rehearse carefully what I would say. But when I got to death row and I was back in that visitation room, I was so overwhelmed,
and they kept me back there a while. And when they finally opened the door, there stood the first condemned prisoner I’d ever
seen, and my image of him was shaped by the chains he was wearing. He had handcuffs on his wrists, a chain around his waist, shackles on his ankles, and it
took them almost 15 minutes to unchain him, and by the time he walked in, I was so overwhelmed
I just started apologizing. I said, “I’m so sorry, I’m just a law student. I don’t know anything about criminal procedure, I don’t know anything about the death penalty,
I don’t know anything about civil procedure or public procedure, but they did send me
down here to tell you you’re not at risk of execution any time in the next year.”
And as soon as I said that the man said, “Wait, wait, wait, say that again.” I said, “you’re not at risk of execution anytime in the next year.”
And the man said, “Wait, wait, say that again.” And I said, “You’re not at risk of execution anytime in the next year.”
And that man grabbed my hand and he said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He said, “You’re the first person I’ve met in the two years that I’ve been on death
row who’s not a death row prisoner or a death row guard.” He said, “I’ve been talking to my wife and my kids over the phone, but I haven’t
let them come and visit because I was afraid I’d have an execution date.” He said, “Now, because of you, I’m going to see my wife, I’m going to see my kids.”
And I couldn’t believe how even in my ignorance, that being proximate could have an impact
on the quality of someone’s life, and we started talking, this man and me, and I was
the first person of color who was part of a legal team that he had met. He knew I was going to Harvard, he was very intrigued by that.
And so he asked me a lot of questions, and then I asked him some questions, and it just
turned out that we weren’t that different. We both had grandmothers that had been formative in our lives.
We both had experienced segregation and discrimination. We both understood that the system wasn’t going to be always fair or just.
And I think he was so genuinely interested in me that it was very easy for me to be genuinely
interested in him. And we just started talking, and then we fell into one of these conversations that felt
very familiar. Phoebe Judge: Finally, after three hours, the guards came in to take the man back to
his cell. Bryan Stevenson said the guards treated the man roughly, putting tight shackles on his
ankles and a chain around his waist. Bryan Stevenson: And I tried to get them to be gentler, but they ignored me.
The condemned man said to me, he said, “Bryan, don’t you worry about this, you just come
back.” And then they started shoving this man towards the door, he almost fell down, and they were
about to push him out of the room, when I watched the man plant his feet, and just before they could push him out of the room, the next time when
they shoved him he didn’t move. And then he turned to me and said, “Bryan don’t worry about this, you just come back.”
And then that man did something I’ve never forgotten, he closed his eyes, he threw his
head back, and he began to sing. And he started singing, “I’m pressing on the upward way / New heights I’m gaining
every day / Still praying as I’m onward bound.” And then he said, “Lord plant my feet on higher ground.”
And I hadn’t heard the song in quite a while before that man sang it, but I’ve never
forgotten it since. [The gospel song plays.] Phoebe Judge: Right then, Bryan Stevenson says he knew, at 23 years old, exactly what
he wanted to do with his life. I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal. [Gospel music continues] A
few years later, on a Saturday morning in 1987, an 18-year-old white woman named Ronda
Morrison opened the dry cleaners where she worked in Monroeville, Alabama. At 10:45 a.m., customers came into the store and couldn’t find anyone working there.
They looked around and found Ronda Morrison’s body on the floor. An autopsy later found three bullets in Ronda’s body, one which had been fired at close range.
For seven months the murder remained unsolved, and then a man stepped forward and said that
he knew who killed Ronda Morrison. He said that he’d seen an African-American man named Walter McMillan near the victim’s
body with money in his hands. Bryan Stevenson: And we believe they chose to arrest Mr. McMillan not because he had
a prior crime history, he didn’t. We believe they chose him because he was having an interracial affair with a young white woman
who was related to one of the officers, and that affair was what brought him to the attention
of the police. And so they arrested him and charged him with this murder, despite the fact that at the
time of the crime, some 11 miles away, he was raising money for his sister’s church.
There were dozens of people with him at the exact time of the crime, miles from it.
And they went to the police, they went to the sheriff, they said, “You’ve got the
wrong man, we were with him when this crime took place, there’s no way he committed
this crime.” But they were ignored. They actually put Mr. McMillan on death row for 15 months pretrial.
It’s the only case I’ve ever worked on where the client spent 15 months awaiting
trial on death row. And the irony for me is that this community, where this crime took place, where this trial
took place, is the very same community where Harper Lee grew up and wrote the beloved American
novel To Kill a Mockingbird. And people in that community love To Kill a Mockingbird.
They put on plays about it, they name streets after characters, they have stores named after it, they’ve dedicated a museum to it, they are
preoccupied with the story of To Kill a Mockingbird. But they were completely indifferent to the plight of an innocent Black man being wrongly
convicted and condemned. Phoebe Judge: Walter McMillan was charged with murder, and the trial was moved to the
primarily white Baldwin County. It lasted a day and a half. The jury found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.
And then, the judge overrode the jury’s sentence of life in prison and gave Walter
McMillan the death penalty. Bryan Stevenson: I got involved in the case, and we started investigating, and quickly
came up with some very powerful evidence of Mr. McMillan’s innocence. They had coerced witnesses to testify falsely against him, and for some bizarre reason they
didn’t just coerce these witnesses to testify falsely, they tape-recorded the sessions when
they were coercing these false statements. And even more bizarre, they didn’t destroy the tapes until we actually got our hands
on these tapes, where the main witness against Mr. McMillan was saying, “You want me to
frame an innocent man for murder, and I don’t feel right about that.” And the police officer says,“Well, if you don’t give us what we want, we’ll put
you on death row.” And it went on like that for minutes. And so we got these tapes, and we got the witnesses to admit that their trial testimony
was false, we uncovered other evidence to prove Mr. McMillan’s innocence, it was time
to go to court. And I was really moved by the fact that on the first day of the hearings, the entire
Black community showed up, poor people from their region showed up. And at the end of that first day in court, after we put all of the evidence about these
tapes and other pieces of evidence, I saw hope growing in that community. And then the next day, when I came back to court, I noticed that all the people of color
were sitting outside the courtroom, they weren’t coming inside. And I went up to the community’s leaders and I said, “Well, why aren’t y’all
inside?” And they said, “They won’t let us in today.” And I went over to the deputy sheriff to go into the courtroom, and I said, “I want
to go inside the courtroom.” And he said, “You can’t come in.” I said, “I’m the defense attorney, I think I have to be able to come in.”
And the deputy looked worried and said, “Well let me go check,” and he ran inside the
courtroom. Then he came back, and he said, “Well, you can come in.” And on the second day they changed the courtroom around.
They placed a metal detector that you had to walk through to get inside the courtroom,
and on the other side of the metal detector they had positioned this huge German shepherd
dog that you had to walk past. And I was angry because the courtroom had been filled, half filled with people who were
supporting the prosecution. They were letting other people in, but not people of color.
And I complained bitterly to the judge, and the judge said, “Well, your people have
to get here earlier tomorrow.” I said, “That’s not the problem, judge. They wouldn’t let them in.”
But I went to the community leaders and explained what had happened and they said, “That’s
OK, Mr. Stevenson, we will be here earlier tomorrow.” And that’s when they began identifying older people of color to be representatives for
the few remaining seats in the courtroom. And they identified this older Black woman by the name of Ms. Williams, and she was so
proud to be given this responsibility. You know, she fixed herself up, she got her hat together, and she started walking towards
the courtroom, and they finally let people of color come inside. And I was inside when I watched this beautiful older Black woman walk through the door, walk
through the metal detector, and then walk up to that dog. But when she saw the dog you could see fear paralyze her.
She stopped dead in her tracks, her body began to shake, her shoulders dropped, tears started
running down her face, and I was standing there watching her while her whole body trembled.
And then I heard her groan really loudly and watched her turn around and run out the courtroom.
It was a painful thing to see. Other people came inside, we had another good day in court, I’d forgotten all about Ms.
Williams until I was going to my car that night. But she was sitting outside when I saw her.
She came over to me and she said, “Mr. Stevenson, I feel so bad,” and she said, “I let you
down today.” I said, “No, Ms. Williams, it’s all right, it’s OK, it’s not your fault.
They shouldn’t have done what they did.” She said, “No, Mr. Stevenson. You don’t understand, I was meant to be in that courtroom, I should have been in that
courtroom.” And she started to cry, and I couldn’t console her. She said, “Mr. Stevenson, I feel so bad.”
She said, “I wanted to be in there so bad but when I saw that dog, all I could think
about was Selma, Alabama, 1965. I remember how we gathered at the Edmund-Pettus Bridge to march to Montgomery for the right
to vote. I remember how they beat us, and I remember those dogs, and I wanted to move, I tried
to move but I just couldn’t do it.” And she walked away with tears running down her face.
The next day I was back at court and her sister told me that that night Ms. Williams didn’t
talk to anybody, they didn’t hear her say anything, she didn’t eat. They said they could just hear her in her room praying all night long.
She was praying, “Lord, I can’t be scared of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.”
And the next morning, Ms. Williams got up and she called the community leaders and asked
them for another chance to be a witness. And on the trip from the house to the courthouse, she kept saying over and over again, “I
ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” And I was standing there talking to her sister when Ms. Williams finally got to the courtroom.
And you could hear her saying over and over again, audibly, she was saying, “I ain’t scared of no dog.”
And I watched this beautiful older Black woman walk through the metal detector, walk up to
this dog, say in a very loud voice, she said, “I ain’t scared of no dog,” and she
walked past the dog, sat down on the front row of that courtroom, and she turned to me
and said, “Mr. Stevenson, I’m here.” And I looked at her and said, “Ms. Williams, it is so good to see you here.”
And I started getting my papers ready, and then she said it again, she said, “No Mr.
Stevenson you didn’t hear me,” she said, “I’m here.” And I looked at her and I said, “No, Ms. Williams, I did see you I’m, I’m glad
to see you here.” I was a little embarrassed. The courtroom got packed full of people, the judge walked in, everybody stood up and everybody
sat back down, except Ms. Williams. And I turned around, and she said one last time in a very loud voice, she said, “I’m
here.” And it became clear to me what she was saying. What she was saying wasn’t that, “I’m physically present,” she wasn’t saying,
“I’m physically here.” What she was saying was, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be Black, but I’m here
because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to stand up to injustice.”
And for me that’s when the case turned. That’s when I knew we were going to prevail.
It is that kind of witness that has ultimately motivated me to see that it is not the power
that you bring, it’s not the wealth, it’s not the status, it is the heart and the hope
that ultimately allows us to achieve justice in cases like this. Phoebe Judge: And they won.
Walter McMillan was exonerated and lived the rest of his life a free man. He died in 2013.
At only 29 years old, Bryan Stevenson rented an old house in Montgomery, Alabama, and opened
what would later become the Equal Justice Initiative. He chose Alabama because it had, and still has, one of the highest execution rates in
the country, and extremely limited resources for public defenders. As soon as he opened the practice, he got a call from a man who had 30 days left.
Bryan Stevenson: And I had to say to him, “I’m sorry, we don’t have books, we don’t have staff, we don’t have resources.
I can’t take any cases just now.” And he was so heartbroken when I said that that he didn’t say another word.
And the next thing I knew he hung up the phone, and I was just holding the phone in anguish,
couldn’t sleep much that night. And he called me the next day and he begged me, he said, “Mr. Stevenson I know you don’t
have your books, I know you don’t have your staff,” he said, “but please tell me you’ll
take my case.” He said, “You don’t have to tell me that you can get a stay, you don’t have to tell
me you can stop the execution, but please tell me you’ll fight for me.” He said, “I don’t think I can make it these next 29 days if there’s no hope at
all.” And when he put it like that, I had to say yes, and we tried very hard to get a stay
of execution. But every court we went to said “too late.” And on the night this man was scheduled to be executed, I got that dreadful call from
the Supreme Court telling me that our last stay motion had been denied. And I drove down to Atmore, Alabama, to be with this man before the execution... and
it was surreal. We had this very emotional, very difficult moment. We were holding hands, we were praying, we were talking, we were crying.
And then he said something to me I’ve never forgotten, he said, “Bryan, it’s been
such a strange day.” He said, “All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’”
He said, “When I woke up this morning the guards came to me and they said, ‘What can
we get you for breakfast?’ At midday they came to me and said, ‘What can we get you for lunch?’
In the evening they came to me and said, ‘What can we get you for dinner?’” He said, “All day long people have been saying, ‘What can I do to help you?
Can I get you coffee? Can I get you water? Can I get you stamps? Can I get you letters?
Can I get you the phone?’” And I never will forget that man saying in those last few minutes, he said, “Bryan,
it’s been so strang.” He said, “More people have said, ‘What can I do to help you?’ in the last 14 hours
of my life than they ever did in the first 19 years of my life.” And it is the anguish of some of those moments that make me appreciate why it is so necessary
that we do better when it comes to human rights in this country, when it comes to justice.
I don’t think the death penalty in America can be resolved by asking whether people deserve
to die for the crimes they commit. I think the threshold question is, do we deserve to kill?
We make terrible mistakes. We’ve now, I just got one, the release of a man a year ago who was the 156th person
exonerated, released from death row after being proven innocent. That being said, for every nine people we’ve executed in this country, we’ve now identified
one innocent person on death row. It is a shameful rate of error. If for every nine planes that took off one crashed, no one would fly.
Phoebe Judge: Have you met anyone in all of your time who you’ve thought is evil, who
you’ve thought, “I don’t wanna waste my time saving this person”? Bryan Stevenson: No.
I mean, I’ve met people who are severely mentally ill. I’ve met people for whom it’s probably likely that they will never be able to get
out of prison because they are dealing with disabilities or challenges that won’t make
it safe for them to get out of jail or prison. But I’ve never met anybody who I think is beyond hope, or beyond redemption, or whose
life doesn’t matter. I think, you know, we have to judge our commitment to the rule of law.
Our commitment to human rights can’t be measured by how we treat people who impress
us, by how we treat people who we like, how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged.
We have to judge our commitment to justice, to the rule of law, to human rights, by not
looking at how we treat the rich and the powerful and the privileged, we have to look at how
we treat the disfavored, the disabled, the condemned. I mean, it’s easy to be just to people you like, people you favor.
It’s easy to be compassionate towards people who you have a lot of respect for, but it’s
not really mercy if you give it to the people who deserve it. Mercy is mercy when it’s given to the undeserving.
And so I’ve never met anybody about whom I should say, “Oh, no, they can’t get mercy.
They don’t deserve it.” It’s — that’s what mercy is about. And I don’t think that I have some special insight or anything.
I think that if anyone saw what I saw on a regular basis, if they could see what I see,
if they could hear what I hear, if they could understand what I understand about what we’re
doing, I think that they would be motivated to do the exact same thing. I think they’d want to end mass incarceration.
I think they’d want to stop this extreme, excessive, cruel punishment. I think they would want more hope and more mercy and more justice.
Phoebe Judge: Your grandfather was murdered. Bryan Stevenson: That’s right. When I was 16, my grandfather was stabbed to death in Philadelphia by several young
men who broke into his apartment and tried to steal a TV, and it was devastating to our
family. My mother was grief stricken. My grandfather had nine children. I had lots of cousins, many of whom were actually working for the police department, and it
was deeply, deeply challenging to imagine this 86-year-old man being stabbed to death
by a lot of reckless young teens. But what was fascinating was what my grandmother, she was less interested in what punishment
these young men would receive, she wanted to talk about why or how anyone could be in
a place in life that they would think that that’s something that they could do. And if she could do anything, she wanted to create a world where children didn’t run
around stabbing old men in low-income projects just for a TV. And she wanted us to look beyond these young men and try to understand something more important
about what’s happening in a world where kids are born into violent families, they
live in violent neighborhoods, they go to violent schools, and become violent people
by the time they’re teenagers, and how do we change that kind of world? And that’s motivated my work as much as anything.
Phoebe Judge: It’s been interesting doing this show about crime. I’ve spoken with so many people who I guess could be judged from the outside as “bad.”
Like they’re a bad person, murderers and things like that. And I’ve never got that sense speaking to someone, coming away from them that this is
a bad person. I’ve only come away with a sense of: how did they get there? You know, how did someone get there, not that they’ve ended up and they’ve crossed the
line. I think that that line — people believe if you've crossed the line, you can never
come back, you’re bad now — just is invisible, there’s so many other things. Bryan Stevenson: Well, I think that’s right.
I mean, if we spent more time trying to understand how it is that people came to these decisions
and why, then we could do so much more to disrupt, to reduce crime, to actually create
public safety. You know, in other cultures, in other countries, in Scandinavia, they think of crime as disorder.
And when someone is arrested for crime they really want to help that person recover.
Punishment for the sake of punishment doesn’t make a lot of sense. There is this idea that rehabilitation is necessary recovery.
And what’s ironic is that we all want rehabilitation when we make mistakes. None of us want to be judged by our worst act.
When we make mistakes, we want a chance to show we’re not just that mistake. And yet we’ve created a system that is so unforgiving, that is so judgmental.
And it’s intoxicating to imagine all of these evil people that we can all organize
and beat up on and go to war against. But it’s dishonest. And one of the great challenges that I think we have in this country is to revive a conversation
about what it means to recover. You know, we don’t give justice to people just because we want to be fair to them, we
give justice to people because we want to be just. We don’t give mercy to people because some people need mercy.
We give mercy to people because we want and need to be merciful. Our strength, our humanity, our dignity turns on how we treat other people, including people
who have committed crimes, including people who have fallen down. And I ultimately think that if we’re going to evolve as a species, our capacity to talk
and think about rehabilitation, about recovery, about redemption, is essential. A world where we only hit back when we are hit, where we only judge who have judged us,
where we only hurt those who hurt us, is a world that is destined to die. And if we believe in life, if we believe in a future, we’re gonna have to get past that.
And crime is a space where we have fallen down, where we’ve allowed the narrative
of fear and anger to take over our thinking, and I want to push back against that.
I think that the one thing I’d say is that we can’t make decisions rooted in fear and
anger when we’re trying to deal with crime, or justice, or even what it means to be just.
Phoebe Judge: So far, Bryan Stevenson has gotten 125 people off of death row. [Music.]
Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Russ Henry.
Julienne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we’ve got a link to Bryan Stevenson’s
book, Just Mercy. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.
We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best podcasts around.
Shows like “The Allusionist,” made by our friend, Helen Zaltzman. Not only does she take us into the history of how we use language, but also shows us
how a word as obvious-seeming as “please” can have different connotations in different
countries, or how one so-called “bad word” comes to be worse than another. It’s really funny and smart.
That’s “The Allusionist” with an ‘A.’ We learn something every time. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity,
chaos, and teamwork. I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal Jingle: Radiotopia, from PRX.

As a law student, Bryan Stevenson was sent to a maximum security prison to meet a man on death row. The man told Stevenson he’d never met an African-American lawyer, and the two of them talked for hours. It was a day that changed Stevenson’s life. He’s spent the last 30 years working to get people off of death row, but has also spent the final hours with men he could not save from execution. He argues that each of us is deserving of mercy.

Learn more about Bryan Stevenson in his book, Just Mercy. https://bookshop.org/books/just-mercy-a-story-of-justice-and-redemption/9780812984965

We interviewed one of Bryan Stevenson’s clients, Ian Manuel, in Episode 170. Listen here: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-170-ian-manuel-7-30-21

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Artwork by Julienne Alexander http://www.yssrs.com/.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 45 originally published 6/17/16 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-45-just-mercy-6-17-2016

Brief Summary

Bryan Stevenson discusses death row experiences, wrongful convictions, and the need for compassion in the justice system.

Key points

Bryan Stevenson's First Encounter. Bryan Stevenson recalls his first meeting with a death row inmate, which changed his life.
Ms. Williams Confronts Her Fear. An elderly woman overcomes her fear to support justice in court.
The Nature of Mercy. Bryan Stevenson discusses the essence of mercy and justice.
Understanding Crime and Redemption. Bryan Stevenson argues for a compassionate view of crime and rehabilitation, challenging societal narratives.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You’re the first person I’ve met in two years who’s not a death row prisoner.

Bryan Stevenson recounts a pivotal moment with a condemned prisoner.

2:31WatchNov 28, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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