“Just Mercy” Panel discussion: The opposite of poverty is justice
C.J. Eldridge, Staff Writer
The topics of justice and equality were discussed in depth during a panel on Bryan Stevenson’s hit book and more recent film “Just Mercy” on Monday, February 13, in Hamlin Recital Hall.
It tells the true story of Walter McMillian, who was wrongly convicted in 1988 for the murder of a young white woman in Monroeville, Alabama. Stevenson, a very young lawyer at the time, heard of the case and went to help, discovering a community bent on putting an innocent black man to death to further a narrative.
The story goes far deeper and displays far more corruption than Stevenson could have ever expected. However, in the end, he was able to get McMillian off of death row after almost six years of near hopelessness.
Stevenson and McMillian filed a lawsuit afterward against the state of Alabama that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
A couple months ago, a committee of African American staff at North Greenville were put together to decide what to do for Black History Month on campus. This discussion panel is one they formed. Dean of Humanities and Sciences, Paul Thompson, was the moderator.
The panelists were Styles, Professor Kelechi Benet and Director of Alumni Relations Lamont Sullivan.
Styles is in the Department of Criminal Justice and has a background in law enforcement and Benet is from the College of Communication and Fine Arts with a specialty in film.
The ramifications of the movie’s events and the topics shown within were discussed at length.
The panel first opened with a song entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It has been considered the African American national anthem for over a century. Jim Clyburn, a representative from South Carolina, sponsored a bill last year for this song to be labeled as the national hymn for America. However, this did not pass.
After showing a trailer for the film, the panelists were asked how they felt after they had watched the movie. The common theme among them was anger and sadness at how the case was handled and the prejudice shown toward the black community of Monroeville.
Styles then went into some of the statistics of the court and legal systems and their problems. He said he believes there are two factors that play into these sorts of wrongful convictions: the fallibility of human beings and the sinfulness of human beings.
“About 69% of cases where individuals were exonerated involved eyewitness misidentification. So, if you can imagine, just the fallibility of human beings in terms of trying to identify somebody, trying to pick somebody out of a lineup. We are not very good at being able to distinguish that, especially when emotions are high and adrenaline is pumping . . . Combine that with biases in different communities within our country, you’re going to have a lot of misidentification, some accidental, some deliberate,” said Styles.
He described how DNA evidence is very new and has led to the exoneration of many people who have been wrongly convicted. Only 15 to 20 years ago were analysts matching hair samples just by how they looked under a microscope. While this was settled science then, now it is realized to be highly inaccurate.
There are also false confessions. Especially with younger people, someone can be convinced into confessing to a crime they did not commit through emotional pressure, through being questioned for upwards of 12 hours in one sitting.
“There’s other reasons as well. Sometimes, as is the case with Walter McMillian, a completely, completely fabricated story because of a narrative that served the purposes of that community . . . My hope to teach with criminal justice is that the goal of a police officer, or particularly a detective or investigator, should not be to simply illicit or bring about a confession . . . rather you should be searching for the truth. If you find out a person was innocent, you need to say that person is innocent,” Styles said.
Professor Benet followed with discussing that Christians are called to tell the truth, and that the bible has a lot to say about false witnesses. There were multiple false witnesses involved in the imprisonment of McMillian. For instance, a known criminal said that he drove McMillian from the scene of the crime so that he could get lessened jail time for something he did.
The panelists talked about the struggles of people, whether falsely imprisoned or not, coming out of the prison system and having a hard time acclimating back into society. They are very disconnected from everything going on. But there are many ministries that help these people rejoin society; they help them get jobs, a drivers license, and things like this. They also keep them accountable.
Bryan Stevenson states, “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”
The panelists had lots of insight into this. It goes into the saying “innocent until proven guilty,” which seems to have been forgotten in many cases today. They advised not to condemn people publicly until it is completely proven true through evidence that a crime was committed.
The media is also responsible for hyping up many cases and will commonly already convict someone before an actual legal conviction has been made.
Stevenson’s quote also says a lot about the legal system. How good of a lawyer someone can afford can often determine how well their case goes. Public defenders, who are supplied by the state, often do not have more than one to two hours to spend working the case.
The observation was made that how the poor are treated in society says a lot more about it than how the wealthy are. The legal system needs to be changed in order to benefit everyone and ensure true justice is carried out as opposed to who has more money.
Sullivan also mentioned a more personal story of how he, as a black male, has to be more careful as he goes about his day and his interactions with people, especially law enforcement, because of prejudices.
One more question was posed by Thompson: “What do you think ‘Just Mercy’ means? What is he [Stevenson] trying to convey?”
Benet answered, “I would have to say applying the word of God especially for us as born again believers, that’s something we see from God [mercy]. And since we see in the scripture that God has shown mercy to Israel and its sin and continued to show mercy to them . . . We are as representatives of Christ to exemplify that.”
“I was really perplexed by the title of ‘Just Mercy,’ because at the end of the movie, my gut was like, ‘well, that’s just justice’ . . . He didn’t deserve to be there anyway. So, I did a little bit of digging because I was curious what Bryan Stevenson meant by that. And Bryan Stevenson, at least in this brief clip that I was watching . . . what he was arguing for, at least in the United States, you have the highest incarceration rate in the world. And that is largely linked to a lot of the different things that we have criminalized that perhaps our society should not . . . What Stevenson would argue for is mercy in that sense. Probably like a reduction in perhaps the offenses . . . If not for the things that we criminalize in society, then the penalties for that,” said Styles.
A member of the audience asked what some practical things were that people could do to be better. The answers were for people to seek equal justice, to be accountable and to be careful not to jump to conclusions until all of the facts have been presented. Whether those facts are presented days, months or even years after the fact, people need to avoid the impulsiveness that will be easy to fall into.
The audience seemed very intrigued by the idea of the opposite of poverty being justice.
Dominic, a sophomore who sat through the panel, said, “The whole deal about the . . . the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth but it’s justice. That was pretty profound. I’ve never heard that before . . . If we just had more justice, better justice, how many broken families that were unnecessarily broken apart, you know, that would fix a lot of poverty. You think of fathers unjustly accused or African Americans unjustly accused. Really anybody . . . Everything that’s connected to them is broken apart.”
And this idea of equal, honest justice stuck with people the most after the event. It was a clear central theme throughout the story of “Just Mercy” and the panel itself.
