The harrowing true story of ‘Just Mercy’ (2024)

As the world is gripped by protests over the death of George Floyd, a 6-month-old movie is being seen with new eyes.

“Just Mercy,” a drama starring Michael B. Jordan as a young lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, who appeals the wrongful murder charge of Walter McMillian, an Alabama black man played by Jamie Foxx, was re-released on streaming for free by its studio, Warner Bros. Available for all of June, it’s now being watched by potentially millions of viewers.

The movie is based on an inspiring — and horrific — true story of a systemic injustice and the yearslong struggle to right a wrong.

“Walter’s experience taught me how our system traumatizes and victimizes people when we exercise our power to convince and condemn irresponsibly,” Stevenson writes in his 2014 book “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.” “But Walter’s case also taught me something else: that there is light within this darkness.”

McMillian was born in 1941 in Monroe County, Ala., the setting of Harper Lee’s seminal novel “To Kill A Mockingbird,” though he’d never heard of it.

In the 1970s, the South still clung to the disgraceful legacy of racist Jim Crow laws that had been struck down throughout the ’50s and ’60s. Knowing his opportunities to succeed were limited, McMillian started a pulp-wood business and became a well-liked, prosperous member of his community.

But after having an affair with a married white woman named Karen Kelly, dormant prejudices took over the town and McMillian’s sterling reputation was marred. Kelly later got together with a drug addict, Ralph Myers, who pinned the shocking 1986 shooting death of an 18-year-old white woman, Ronda Morrison, on McMillian under police pressure. Myers also accused the innocent man of sodomizing him — a double whammy of Deep South taboos.

The police department, which was pelted with criticism for taking months to solve the crime, needed to make an arrest. Any arrest. So, without any real evidence, McMillian became their scapegoat.

Myers’ story was ridiculous. “His knack for dramatic embellishment made even the most basic allegations unnecessarily complicated,” Stevenson writes. Myers claimed McMillian chose him, a white man, at random in the middle of the day to be his accomplice in the murder, even though McMillian was perfectly capable of driving himself and had never met Myers in his life.

Worried for his own future, a few days before the capital murder charges against McMillian were announced, Myers fessed up to the cops and admitted his story was bunk. They didn’t care. Both men, who had not yet been tried or convicted of a crime, were transferred from county jail to death row.

The trial began in 1988. Many witnesses testified that McMillian was, in fact, at a fish fry at his own house when the murder was committed. The jury was ambivalent. They sentenced McMillian to life imprisonment, and Judge Robert E. Lee Key went one step further, overruling their decision and giving him the death penalty.

Stevenson was in his 20s and eager to take on the case, even though the unfortunately named judge discouraged him from doing so.

“Why on Earth would you want to represent someone like Walter McMillian?”, Judge Key told him on the phone. “Do you know he’s reputed to be one of the biggest drug dealers in all of South Alabama?” Key then hung up.

At first, four appeals were denied, but Stevenson was determined, knowing that there was not enough evidence to end a man’s life. “We’re just getting started, Walter,” he said. “There is a lot more to do, and we’re going to make them confront this.”

Circumstances began to look up when Myers called Stevenson out of the blue.

“I think you need to come and see me,” Myers said. “I have something I need to tell you.”

Myers admitted to the lawyer he’d lied about the murder all along, having been convinced by local police. He also said the Alabama Bureau of Investigation threatened the death penalty against Myers if he didn’t testify against McMillian. It turned out the state’s star witness was a flop.

The cause was also helped by national journalists. While “local papers had painted Walter as a dangerous drug dealer who had possibly murdered several innocent teenagers,” an in-depth “60 Minutes” segment sowed doubts about the unfair legal process and McMillian’s guilt.

After six years of being on death row, McMillian was finally exonerated in 1993.

In the car on the way home from court, McMillian, who died in 2013 at age 71, looked at Stevenson.

“I feel like a bird,” he said. “I feel like a bird.”

The harrowing true story of ‘Just Mercy’ (2024)

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