JUST MERCY

I recently was impressed by a video which I found at the Marion County Public Library. This is a movie about overcoming injustice which occurred not one or two hundred years ago but took place in 1987 in Alabama. It clearly portrays the suffering of individuals on death row who are there because of a judicial system which punishes and executes people because of their race without determining their guilt of committing a crime.

One irony of the story is that it occurred in the same county where the fictional account of a white attorney, Atticus Finch, took place. In To Kill a Mockingbird he was defending a black defendant accused of raping a white woman. Harper Lee's story which was published in 1960 was based on people and events in Monroeville, Alabama when she was a child in 1936.

Although Harper Lee's story was fictionalized, Just Mercy is an account of events that happened in the way in which they are portrayed. We watch as a young Black lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School confronts the authorities in a white dominated society for the sake of a man who is unjustly on death row. We are exposed to the prejudice and brutality which are necessary to keep a system of white supremacy functioning. This movie is not likely to be one that you 'enjoy' but one you are likely to remember because of scenes of the death row prisoners in support of one of their who is being executed. Equally impressive are scenes of the Black community as they experience the sorrow of disappointment and the joy of successfully confronting the oppressive system.

This movie should be watched with the consciousness that we are not watching a past which no longer exists. We are blind to our complicity in allowing similar abuses of justice to happen now.

Scenes from Just Mercy.