Just Mercy is a seemingly inspirational tale about defense attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), who represents death row inmate Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx). But behind the optimistic veneer, the film actually has a dangerous - or at least problematic - message. Beginning with the founding of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson’s non-profit legal defense organization, and following McMillan’s case through a four-and-a-half-year appeals process, Just Mercy depicts the racial inequities in the U.S. legal system in stark and compelling terms.
Critically acclaimed for its performances - particularly by Foxx, who earned a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Male Actor in a Supporting Role - the film falls into the subgenre of “exoneration movies” like The Hurricane, Crown Heights, and When They See Us, with African American protagonists fighting against the justice system’s racially charged injustices and ultimately winning their freedom. Just Mercy has many of the familiar tropes of the genre: overwhelming evidence in favor of the accused, racist law enforcement officers, and a victorious conclusion.
What makes Just Mercy’s message dangerous is that it propagates the myth that the American justice system’s profound errors are often corrected. Telling stories of triumph more often than stories of failure lends credence to the idea that ultimately justice gets served.
Death Penalty
Just Mercy depicts multiple characters on death row, but the only one executed during the film’s action is Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan). Richardson admits to committing the crime for which he is sentenced, but there are extenuating circumstances: Richardson returned from Vietnam with mental health issues that, he states, contributed to his actions. The film wrings his execution for pathos effectively, and the death penalty’s administration motivates Stevenson to continue working on McMillan’s case.
The Richardson B-plot structurally works to motivate the protagonist, but thematically, this section is about Stevenson’s - and by extension the film’s - rejection of the death penalty as a means of punishment. The film demonstrates that execution is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, an extension of the unjust U.S. legal system.
However, from a strictly mercenary point of view, the guilty party is punished, and his is the only execution portrayed during the film’s action. The film is therefore at odds with its message: on the one hand, death is an unjust punishment, but on the other hand, the only execution the film shows is one of a guilty man, technically an end in accordance with the law. Both of those theses can be true, but it's dependent on each audience member's political position on the death penalty.
McMillan’s Case
In McMillan’s case, which concludes during the film’s climax, Stevenson successfully wins a retrial and subsequent dismissal of all charges. The audience leaves the theater knowing that the system has inequities, racially motivated prejudices, and a cruel administration of the ultimate punishment. However, the lingering message is that eventually - with pluck, hard work, and a skilled legal mind - the system can be beaten.
From the outset, McMillan is obviously innocent. He’s arrested by a clearly racist police officer (Michael Harding), who is portrayed with Confederate flags and drops racial epithets with impunity, and McMillan has an entire community of alibis. Over the course of Stevenson’s investigation, a key witness (Tim Blake Nelson) recants his testimony. When McMillan is eventually exonerated, it is in part because a new district attorney (Rafe Spall) finally sees his obvious innocence.
The message is that the system is corrupt and racist, rife with injustice – a man lost almost five years of his life and was forced to live that time in constant fear of his impending death – but Just Mercy’s ultimately hopeful ending implies that within that system is a series of checks and balances that make the system palatable. Yes, the system is bad, the film seems to say, but within it is the possibility for self-correction. Contrasted with the reality of the U.S. justice system’s failures, there may be room to doubt whether just ends are as common as the film and the sum of Hollywood's stories about exoneration narratives imply.
The Larger Context of Just Mercy
The film’s final crawl quotes a statistic on the Equal Justice Initiative’s website: “For every nine people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated.” The implication isn’t just that execution is unethical and unjust – as seen in the Richardson B-plot – but that the administration of the death penalty is compounded by the likelihood that an innocent has been put to death.
There are few films about those cases. Fictional stories, like The Green Mile, have ended in the execution of an innocent character, and foreboding documentaries like 13th depict the worst tendencies of the U.S. justice system. But in most dramatizations of true stories, when the protagonist is innocent - like McMillan, or the way Rubin Carter (Denzel Washington) is portrayed in Hurricane - the third act usually sees him freed. Broadly speaking, that filmmakers tell stories about the justice system’s eventual successes more often than its failures feeds the narrative that its checks and balances work - though reality, as highlighted in the statistic that closes Just Mercy, tells a grimmer tale.
There’s no doubt that the story at the heart of Just Mercy is inspirational: Bryan Stevenson, with ingenuity and persistence, won freedom for his wrongly convicted client, and Walter McMillan, with grit and perseverance, endured unimaginable hardships in order make it to the end. And when moviegoers see a phenomenal true story about the success of one man against a deeply flawed system, they may leave with motivation to work to change that system. Perhaps there is value in telling stories about a triumph of justice over injustice, but such a story masks the hundreds of untold stories, those of people whose wrongful conviction ended in continued imprisonment or death, not exoneration. Those stories have a harsher truth to tell, one that dulls the inspirational feeling the closes Just Mercy. And while a film that ends in the execution of the innocent, the banal triumph of injustice, may not break any box office records, its ubiquity in the day-to-day trenches of the U.S. justice system is a reason that such films should be made.