Lynching by lawyers

Just Mercy ... Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative ... Saving the misrepresented from death row ... Black men presumed guilty in America's south ... Racist legal system ... Dirty prosecution tricks ... Frying flesh... Miss Lumière at the movies 

Stevenson: equal justice

According to the little black book (John 8:32) "the truth shall set you free"… but not if you're a black man on death row in Alabama.

This is the melancholy fact at the heart of the disturbing new legal/civil rights film, Just Mercy.

It's a curious title, since the film's preoccupation is not mercy, but structural injustice, as it impacts upon the lives of those less fortunate. 

In America that simply means being black (and poor). 

Just Mercy is based on the book of the same name by Bryan Stevenson, a young, black law graduate from Harvard who established the now much heralded Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, birthplace of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee.

Co-writer and director Destin Daniel Cretton makes delicious, if bitter irony of local whites touting the Harper Lee Museum in Monroeville, amidst a racism that still seethes under the surface of Alabamy life in 1989.

Stevenson, beautifully under-played by Michael B. Jordan, arrives in the Deep South with a mission (and a federal grant) to provide proper legal representation to black men on death row.

We soon learn just how improper their previous legal representation has been - from non-existent to plain incompetent. 

Just Mercy makes the point (perhaps too often) that nobody cares about these men; they are presumed guilty by virtue of their ethnicity.

The legal system, in cahoots with a police force underpinned by slithering racism, have consigned these men to the electric chair (more of that particular horror later) with no credible evidence, not a second thought, or a moral twinge.

As Johnny D (Jamie Foxx) tells Stevenson at their first meeting in the Holman Correctional Centre:

"It's just another way to lynch a black man."

The film concerns the fate of three men on death row - Walter McMillian (known as Johnny D), ex-soldier Herbert Richardson (a stunning turn by Rob Morgan) and Anthony Ray Hinton (O'Shea Jackson Jnr).

It opens with Johnny D being pulled over by police on a lonely stretch of road in the dead of a Monroe County night. 

The sense of dread and Johnny's painful, obsequious attempts to do their bidding are palpable as he is hauled out of his car, slammed face-down with a gun to his head and later charged with the murder of an eighteen year old white girl at Jackson's Dry Cleaners.

Of course, he's innocent. And there's the rub.

How Stevenson pursues his bid to exonerate Johnny D makes for a compelling, if rather old-fashioned film.

As the idealistic young lawyer digs into the evidence, it becomes clear that Johnny D was framed by a con, Ralph Myers (a simultaneously repellent and oddly sympathetic performance by Tim Blake Nelson) who did a deal to get a cell far away from death row because he could "smell burning skin".

The one execution scene (of Herb who loses his appeal) mercifully spares us that searing detail; cutting away before the bolt hits and flesh fries.

It is all the more powerful, for not showing the true barbarity of capital punishment.

All the while, Cretton focuses on the victim's face, full screen, making it impossible to deny this man's humanity.

It's a technique he employs throughout Just Mercy and it works because he has assembled a superb cast.

Jamie Foxx, who captured the essence of Ray Charles so vividly in Ray (and for which he rightly won an Oscar and every other major acting bauble), subtly conveys Johnny's D's complexity, as he veers from anger to despair to disbelief to hope.

It's another career-defining performance. 

Some of the writing strays into the sentimental, especially in the down-home black community scenes, and some of the dialogue is a little po-faced, but the film is saved by the story's real emotional heft.

After several losses in the lower courts involving dirty tricks by the prosecution, justice finally comes good - in part due to a canny move by Stevenson to have Johnny D's plight broadcast on 60 Minutes. 

The Alabama Supreme Court upholds Stevenson's submission that all charges against Johnny D be dropped. 

It's a perfect Hollywood ending, if not necessarily a happy one. 

Before the credits roll, we are told that for every nine people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated. 

Just Mercy is showing at selected cinemas now.