By: Maha Attique
A heart wrenching adaptation of lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, “ A Story Of Justice and Redemption”, the story offers a glimpse into the life of a man struggling to fight against the age old American socioeconomic system born from the ashes of slavery still bound by constraints of its past.
Set in 1987 Monroe County, Alabama, the movie follows the life of an ambitious rookie lawyer, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B Jordan), fresh out of Harvard law school, on his way to Alabama as an advocate for wrongly convicted death row inmates.
With the support of local advocate Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), Stevenson takes on the infamous case of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx); an innocent African American sentenced to death for a crime that he evidently did not commit. What followed were six years of relentless struggle against racial injustice and discrimination in order to prove the innocence of a man who had fallen victim to the corruption of institutionalized racism.
In the real-life account of the case, Walter McMillian was convicted for the murder of an 18-year-old white woman, Ronda Morrison, who was shot multiple times at a dry cleaner . When Stevenson began looking into the case, he encountered an array of inconsistencies and instances of racially driven motives to keep the Morrison case closed.
Determined to prove the innocence of his client, Stevenson began digging into records and discovered that, not only had McMillian been found guilty in a trial lasting only two days with a majority white jury reliant on a false testimony provided by a convicted criminal in exchange for promises of freedom, but the defendant had an reasonable alibi with dozens of witnesses. Before this conviction, McMillian had no criminal record other than a misdemeanor charge after a bar fight.
McMillian's case eventually garnered national attention and was the topic of a 1992 "60 Minutes" expose that showed how fraudulent and weak the case was against the convicted man awaiting death . In 1993, Alabama's Court of Criminal Appeals conducted a hearing again. After turning down four previous appeals, the court ruled that McMillian had, indeed, been wrongfully convicted.
Uncovering the deep-rooted racial bias at the core of the death penalty was a challenge. From bomb threats to legal setbacks, Stevenson valiantly conquered every obstacle and, in 1993, McMillian was exonerated and walked free. Several witnesses that had originally testified against McMillian admitted they had lied in their original testimony and judges ruled that the state had suppressed evidence.
Bryan Stevenson is still alive today as the Director of Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that provides legal representation to silenced prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted. The story also got the general public thinking about the racial composition of the inmates put on death row. Why were Walter McMillian and Anthony Ray Hinton both black? Why are 42% of death row inmates today African American, when black people form just 13% of the US population?
In short, the movie managed to sufficiently sum up the American justice system and how it has yet to fully recover from its racially motivated beginnings. Bryan Stevenson himself has commended the director, Destin Daniel Cretton, for accurate depiction of events despite the condensation of the timeline in order to tell the whole story, as well as shining light on the stories of fellow inmates, Anthony ray Hilton who was wrongly convicted of the murders of two fast food restaurant managers in 1985, and Herbert Richardson, a black Vietnam War veteran who was honorably discharged due to psychiatric illness and was electrocuted for the pipe-bomb killing of an 11-year-old girl in 1977.
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