Just Mercy - Racism, Capital Punishment and Brokenness

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Matthew 25:40, KJV

"Being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make. Sometimes we're fractured by things we never would have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion." - Brian Stevenson, Just Mercy


With the recent tragic death of George Floyd, I have been reflecting about individual and systemic racism in America and came across a book recommendation for "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson.  I quickly ordered a copy and could not put it down.  It was a truly eye-opening and inspiring work that talks about Bryan Stevenson's founding of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama in 1989 to help those in the U.S. criminal justice system who have been wrongly convicted or harshly sentenced, which often included people of color.

The book centers around Mr. Stevenson's efforts to exonerate Walter McMillian, a black man wrongly condemned in Alabama to be executed for a high-profile murder of a white women that he very obviously did not commit.  The trial is an expose of systemic racism and injustices in the U.S. criminal justice that have resulted from the institutions of slavery, followed by a reign of terror during the reconstruction era, followed by Jim Crow laws and finally mass incarceration. The main narrative is interspersed with fascinating and heart-breaking vignettes about other individuals that Mr. Stevenson has, with mixed success, tried to help who faced also faced unfair and harsh treatment in the US criminal justice system - children tried as adults and sentenced to death by execution or death in prison through a life sentence, mentally ill individuals, and women in prisons.

Racism

Having grown up as a white male in an affluent home, race was rarely, if ever, a dinnertime or family home evening topic.  I had friends in high school that were black or brown and really didn't think much of it either way. I remember considering programs like affirmative action - giving preference to minorities in college admissions - to be unfair to me as a white male. When the term "black lives matter" was introduced following the death of Treyvon Martin, I naturally gravitated toward "all lives matter"- no need to draw distinctions about which types of lives matter (I see this differently now). I knew that there were economic disparities that seems to disproportionately impact minority groups, but I think I largely gravitated toward the idea that your wealth and success is almost entirely product of the amount of work you put in, not impacted by the color of your skin. In short, I think largely I grew up to be "color blind" which likely also blinded me to the inequalities and racial prejudices that were alive and well in America and perhaps even alive and well within myself. I recently took an unconscious bias test designed by Harvard which showed that, not surprisingly, I still am largely prejudiced in favor of white males who look like me.

As far as I can recall, I have never had an encounter with a police officer other than an uneventful speeding ticket five or so years ago in California.  I was never taught and have not felt the need to teach my kids how to interact with police officers because as a white male, I am not likely to ever be the subject of police violence.  I have been shocked to hear stories from some of my black friends about their experiences of being harassed by police after being pulled over for minor traffic violations.  Bryan Stevenson tells of his own experience being confronted by police officers late at night after coming back from a court case and listening to music in his car briefly before going up to his house.  After getting out of his car to go up to his apartment to get out of the way of the police for whatever they were there for, he realized that he was actually the reason they stopped. One of the officers pointed a loaded gun at him and his first instinct, even with his professional experience with police injustices, was to run - which likely would have resulted in him being shot.  The police illegally searched his car looking for drugs, ruffled through his case files and went as far as picking their fingers and sniffing his bag of M&Ms. Many of my black friends have had similar experiences after doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Prisons in America

While on my LDS mission in Honduras, one thing I noticed was that the "standard" prayers given by Hondurans frequently include a line asking God to help those in the prisons.  I found this odd. I had never (or rarely?) heard such a phrase used in my own church experience growing up. Why would we want to pray for the criminals? Didn't they deserve to be punished for their crimes? Despite the astonishing statistic cited in Just Mercy that one in fifteen people born in the United States is expected to go to jail or prison based on current incarceration rates, to this day, I can't think of a single person that I know personally that has gone to jail. And for black males, that number is one in three!  I honestly don't know much about the criminal justice system in Honduras that would lead to such prayers, other than high rates of gang violence and Honduras supposedly having the highest murder rate per capita in the world, but I suspect that the prayers of many black and minority individuals in the United States also include pleas for those in prisons.

Just within the last few years my perspective has started to changed and I've begun to notice the tragic realities of racism that still haunt our communities today. Not that the problems are new, I just was blind to the injustices that existed.   I would certainly not consider myself to be racist, but the biases and prejudices still exist, even if I do not always consciously acknowledge them.

Consider a few sobering statistics about our prison systems and racial prejudices (source: NAACP):

- Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in America increased from roughly 500,000 to over 2.2 million.

- The United States makes up about 5% of the world’s population and has 21% of the world’s prisoners

- 1 in every 37 adults in the United States, or 2.7% of the adult population, is under some form of correctional supervision.

- African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.

- A criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent. The negative impact of a criminal record is twice as large for African American applicants.

- Spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of spending on Pre‐K‐12 public education in the last thirty years.

Capital punishment

Bryan Stevenson's book broadened my perspective about systemic racism, capital punishment and the cruelness of the criminal justice system in the United States.  Having a conservative political upbringing, I have always thought capital punishment was an appropriate punishment for the "really bad" people. Like most Americans, however, I have never witnessed and hope to never witness the execution of another human being. Stevenson outlines some of the terrors of the death penalty in the United States - innocent men and women wrongly condemned to die, failed electric chair executions resulting in multiple attempts before the person actually dies, the stench of burning human flesh, and drugs that have been used for lethal injections that torture individuals in ways other countries had outlawed as inhumane, cruel and unusual punishment, even for animals.

From the news media perspective, we are used to hearing all of the details about crimes committed and in many cases are rightly outraged and hurt deeply for the victims and their families.  But we rarely hear the backstory on what led a person to commit the crime in the first place and even more rarely do we hurt deeply for those that committed the crime. I have been all too guilty of condemning people based on an emotional response to a very cursory summary of the facts from a brief news summary.  In fact, in the case of George Floyd, my initial reaction, which I think I verbalized to my wife, was that the officer responsible for his death deserved to die himself. What a terrible reaction to have, even considering the horrors of George Floyd's death.

Throughout the book, I kept wrestling with the question of whether certain crimes are so heinous that they, in fact, merit being put to death. Perhaps having harsh penalties deters some people from committing such heinous crimes to begin with.  But Bryan Stevenson's response to this continues to cause me to pause and reflect: "the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment is, 'Do we deserve to kill?'"

Broken

Anne Frank was famously quoted as saying that "in spite of everything [i.e. the holocaust!].. people are truly good of heart."  This is often hard to see and may seem naive in light of many of the terrible crimes that have been committed throughout history.  However, like Anne Frank, I hold a personal conviction that no one is born evil and we are each, for better or worse, largely a product of the causes and conditions that made us who we are today. This is not to excuse the impact that our choices make have on our individual lives but rather a constant reminder that I cannot be the judge of another person because I will never know the full extent of what led them to be who they are today.

For many, significant hardships can be a great motivator that leads us to push through and become better as a result.  For others, particularly in cases of significant abuse or neglect, and often coupled with mental illness, these hardships lead to a breaking point. Many of the stories Bryan Stevenson presents in his book have tragic back stories of years or decades of abuse, mistreatment, neglect, and mental illness that led them to commit the crimes they committed.  Rather than dealing with the root of these societal problems - mental illness, abuse, PTSD, etc. we choose to execute them, or lock them away forever and hide them from society - we are quick to condemn people for the worst thing that they have ever done . Bryan Stevenson adds these poignant words: "...simply punishing the broken - walking way from them or hiding them from sight - only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity."

At one point, Bryan Stevenson recalls his despair after losing an appeal and his client being executed.  He began to question why he continued to do the difficult work that he had made his life calling.  He remembers thinking that he felt like he helps people because he realized that we are all, like his clients, broken. "We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent."

The hole in our wall

I think there is something profound in sharing our brokenness with others - something that increases our capacity for love, mercy, and forgiveness. While I love the work of Brene Brown on sharing our vulnerability with others, I am still quick to try to present the best version of myself and hide my own brokenness. I'm not saying I think I'm a horrible person by any means, but I cover up my own faults in hopes that no one will notice or think less of me.

One recent example comes to mind that may help illustrate.  Despite all of the wonderful joys of parenthood, I struggle at times with feeling overwhelmed with some of the stress of parenting four young children, particularly around bedtime - the tears, screaming, tantrums and disrupted sleep are at times too much for me to handle. My wife and I are usually pretty good at "tag teaming" - taking over when the other seems at or beyond his or her breaking point.

By evening time a few months ago, I was tired and beyond exhausted from the day and I think my wife and I were both well beyond our breaking points. We both made several attempts over the course of what seemed like hours to try to calm and soothe the screaming baby and get her to sleep for the night - but no amount of comfort, water, food, diaper changes, toys, pacifiers or anything else we could reasonably conceive of seemed to help. This was compounded by our four year old, who shares a room, also screaming and throwing an epic tantrum, probably fueled by his own lack of sleep due to the screaming. At one point after leaving the screaming room for probably the fourth or fifth time (and my wife having made at least as many attempts), I felt so frustrated that I punched the wall in the hallway across from their room.  To my surprise, my fist went through the wall. I knew I would never actually express my anger through physical abuse and had waited until leaving the room to express my frustration, but the anger and rage I experienced that caused me to punch a hole in the wall surprised me and left me feeling broken and like absolute failure as a father.  I went to the bed and laid down and wept for a long time.

Probably a week or so before we had a family lesson, which unlike many lessons, I thought actually went very well.  Our oldest, Madison, prepared and taught a great lesson on managing our emotions - including a coloring exercise where each of the kids colored a page of faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, and fear/anxiety.  We hung the artwork on the wall in the hallway.  I still have not fixed the hole in the wall, so one of those pieces of artwork from our kids now hangs directly over the hole, which serves as a personal reminder to try my best to manage my own emotions in a healthy way. I'm still not great at it.  (The irony, as I'm writing this at almost 9:00 PM, she woke up about 15 minutes ago screaming and we haven't been able to console her yet after a couple attempts. It's frustrating. I'm going in now to try again... update, it's now 9:39 PM - she's now calmed down but not sleepy - in bed with my wife.. anyways, back to what I was writing)

Stonecatchers

We are often so quick to condemn people for the worst things that they have ever done but slow to extend grace and mercy. Toward the end of Just Mercy, Stevenson talks about a profound experience he had with a woman at a courthouse in New Orleans.  He had successfully argued to have two men immediately released from prison, each of whom had spent around 50 years in prison after life without parole sentences for non-homicide convictions as young teenagers. After the hearings, he noticed an older black woman he did not recognize who had attended all the proceedings. She told Bryan Stevenson her tragic story of the murder of her 16-year old grandson fifteen years prior.  She had hoped that the trial and sentencing of the perpetrators would bring her peace and closure, but after seeing them sentenced to life in prison, the woman recalled that she "sat in the courtroom after they were sentence and cried and cried," and after a while, "a lady came over to me and gave me a hug and let me lean on her." About a year after the convictions for her grandson's murder, she decided to regularly come to the courthouse to seek out and try to comfort those that needed someone to lean on - often family members of victims or family of perpetrators.

She told Bryan Stevenson, "All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they're not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don't care. I don't know, it's a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other."

I love this reference to the parable of the woman caught in adultery - one of the most profound teachings of Jesus on love and compassion. Not only should I strive to not condemn others, but I hope to be able to find ways to be someone who can try to catch the stones that others are throwing at each other - to be a defense to the hopeless, to those who some would consider the "least of these."


P.S. It's now 10:10 PM. The baby finally went down again for the night 5 minutes ago. I'm also going to bed.