48 Fun Facts About Just Mercy

Which actor plays defence lawyer Bryan Stevenson in the 2019 film Just Mercy?

Michael B. Jordan also produced the film through his company Outlier Society, which had pledged to adopt the inclusion rider, a contract clause demanding diverse casts and crews, on all its projects.

Which actor plays the wrongly convicted Walter McMillian in the 2019 film Just Mercy?

Jamie Foxx plays a real man: Walter McMillian spent six years condemned in Alabama before every charge against him was dismissed in 1993.

Walter McMillian was convicted of a murder committed in which small Alabama town, best known as Harper Lee's home?

Monroeville, the model for Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird, is the memoir's central irony: a town that celebrates a novel about a wrongly accused Black man while condemning one.

Dozens of witnesses, including a police officer, saw McMillian at what event when the 1986 murder took place?

A church fish fry on McMillian's own front lawn was his alibi, and the jury ignored every Black witness who swore to it under oath.

McMillian's jury voted for life, yet he was sentenced to death under which now-abolished Alabama practice?

Judicial override let an elected trial judge replace a jury's life verdict with death; Alabama judges did so about a hundred times before the state became the last to abolish it in 2017.

Which Just Mercy co-writer and director went on to make his first superhero film for Marvel?

Destin Daniel Cretton, later hired for Marvel's Shang-Chi, based his earlier drama Short Term 12 on two years he spent on the staff of a group home for at-risk teenagers.

Which actor plays Eva Ansley, who runs the Equal Justice Initiative's office with Stevenson, in the 2019 film Just Mercy?

Brie Larson was reuniting with her Short Term 12 and Glass Castle director, making Just Mercy their third film together.

Bryan Stevenson earned both a law degree and a public policy master's in 1985 from which university?

Harvard is where a class on race and poverty litigation sent Stevenson to intern with death-row lawyers in the South, which he calls the moment he found his calling.

Stevenson put the entire prize from which 1995 award into keeping the Equal Justice Initiative running?

The MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, arrived just after Congress cut funding for the death-penalty defence centres Stevenson had been running.

How does Stevenson's best-known line end: 'Each of us is more than...'?

'The worst thing we've ever done' is a belief Stevenson traces to the congregation he grew up in, where people were celebrated for standing up after having fallen down.

Which career criminal, the state's only claimed eyewitness, was indicted alongside McMillian and testified against him?

Ralph Myers pleaded guilty as a conspirator and took a 30-year term, while McMillian, the man he accused, was sent to death row.

The trial judge who sentenced McMillian to death bore the name of which Confederate general?

Robert E. Lee Key Jr. was the judge's full name; before the trial he moved the case to another county, one that was overwhelmingly white.

Stevenson took McMillian's story to which TV newsmagazine in the fall of 1992 to build public pressure?

60 Minutes took the case to a national audience in November 1992, about three months before the conviction was thrown out, and the film restages the interview.

After graduating in 1985, Stevenson joined which death-penalty defence group, run by Stephen Bright?

The Southern Center for Human Rights assigned Stevenson to Alabama, the posting that led him to found his own organization there four years later.

Which 2005 Supreme Court ruling, ending the death penalty for under-18 crimes, opened EJI's juvenile campaign?

Roper v. Simmons gave Stevenson his template: if children were too immature to execute, he argued, they were too immature to be locked up until death.

Which 2010 ruling, two years before Miller, barred life without parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases?

Graham v. Florida also entitled Joe Sullivan to a new sentence: the Stevenson client, sent to prison for life at 13, had his own appeal heard alongside it.

Which Stevenson client, freed from Alabama's death row in 2015 after nearly three decades, wrote The Sun Does Shine?

Anthony Ray Hinton walked free after the state found the bullets in evidence did not match the gun from his home, and the US Supreme Court had overturned his conviction unanimously.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, which distributor made Just Mercy free to stream for a month?

Warner Bros. had only picked up the film in 2017 after its original studio, Broad Green Pictures, went bankrupt mid-development.

On which holiday in 2020 did TBS, TNT and truTV air Just Mercy back to back with Black Panther?

Juneteenth was the hook for a social-justice broadcast whose interviews included Stevenson and Senator Kamala Harris.

Just Mercy had its world premiere in September 2019 at which film festival, three months before its US release?

Toronto fitted a new plan: a week before the festival named its line-up, the studio had moved the film's opening forward into the year-end awards season.

Just Mercy opened in just four US theaters on which holiday in 2019, to qualify for that season's awards?

Christmas Day's opening came two weeks after the film's supporting actor had already been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award, ahead of its release.

Just Mercy earned an A+ from which firm that polls opening-night moviegoers?

CinemaScore's top grade did not mean top of the chart: Just Mercy opened wide in fifth place, just behind Like a Boss, a comedy its own audiences graded B.

Just Mercy won Outstanding Motion Picture at which ceremony in February 2020, where both its leads also won?

The NAACP Image Awards honoured Just Mercy six weeks after Oscar voters had passed it over without a single nomination.

Besides being its subject, what credited role did Bryan Stevenson himself take on the 2019 film Just Mercy?

Executive producer was Stevenson's credit on the film, and a 2024 Stanford study found that watching it left viewers with more empathy for formerly incarcerated people.

Walter McMillian was convicted of killing an 18-year-old clerk at what kind of business?

A dry cleaner's, Jackson Cleaners, was where Ronda Morrison was shot in November 1986; evidence later pointed elsewhere, but the case has never been officially solved.

Which Straight Outta Compton star plays McMillian's death-row neighbour in the 2019 film Just Mercy?

O'Shea Jackson Jr. plays a real prisoner, a man Stevenson's team spent more than 15 years fighting to free before his release in 2015.

Which English actor plays Tommy Chapman, the district attorney who finally joins the motion to free McMillian?

Rafe Spall's Chapman is drawn from the real district attorney, who had defended the conviction on appeal before joining the defence in asking that every charge be dropped.

What did McMillian's lawyers find on the flip side of the state witness's taped confession?

Him protesting being made to lie about a man he did not know, for a crime neither had any part in, sat on the B-side of the prosecution's own evidence.

Which American Library Association prize for nonfiction did Just Mercy win in 2015, a year after publication?

The Andrew Carnegie Medal went to Just Mercy over a shortlist that included Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, that year's Pulitzer winner for nonfiction.

Which Nobel Peace laureate, praising the memoir, has likened Bryan Stevenson to Nelson Mandela?

Desmond Tutu also profiled Stevenson for Vanity Fair, writing that 'justice needs champions, and Bryan Stevenson is such a champion'.

Who wrote in 2020 that Stevenson's 'masterful' memoir guided her understanding of mass incarceration?

Oprah Winfrey added that a visit to Stevenson's Alabama office led her to a former prisoner's memoir, which she made an Oprah's Book Club pick.

Which coffee chain's in-store promotion in summer 2015 pushed Just Mercy onto the Publishers Weekly best-seller list?

Starbucks sold the memoir in its cafés and gave its profits from the book to Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative.

Stevenson pitched the memoir to an editor at Spiegel & Grau on the strength of what, and was signed immediately?

A TED talk in 2012 did more than land a book deal: its audience gave money on the spot for his campaign to stop children being jailed with adults.

Stevenson chose the title Just Mercy to make which point about justice and mercy?

They are not mutually exclusive: Stevenson writes that mercy is at its most powerful when it goes to the undeserving, at the moment it is least expected.

How does the memoir divide its attention between the McMillian story and Stevenson's other clients?

Alternating by chapter: the odd chapters follow one man for years while the even ones visit the children, the poor and the mentally ill.

What did McMillian's lawyers learn about the truck witnesses placed at the scene?

It became a low-rider only later, months after the murder, yet the witnesses had described a low-rider; all three prosecution witnesses went on to recant.

What had made Walter McMillian the subject of local gossip before he was accused of murder?

An affair with a white woman, exposed in her very public divorce, drew attention to McMillian, and by Stevenson's account it turned him into a suspect.

Which relative of Bryan Stevenson was stabbed to death in a Philadelphia robbery when the future lawyer was 16?

His grandfather's killers received life sentences, an outcome Stevenson thought fair, because he came from a world that valued redemption over revenge.

Stevenson grew up in Milton, a small town in which state, where Black patients still used the doctor's back door?

Delaware's Cape Henlopen High School made him student body president and an American Legion public-speaking winner before a scholarship took him to college.

As a 1983 law-student intern, Stevenson met his first death-row inmate in which state, where the memoir begins?

Georgia is where the book opens its thirty-year arc, which closes with McMillian's natural death in 2013.

Alongside running EJI from Montgomery, Stevenson has long been a professor at which law school?

NYU drew him in with funding for students and recent graduates to work on his cases in Alabama, and his capital-defender clinic has sent students to EJI in Montgomery.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which Stevenson opened in Montgomery in 2018, honours whom by name?

Victims of lynching, more than 4,000 from 1877 to 1950, are named on dark metal columns hung overhead, with duplicates on the ground for each county to claim.

An EJI monument wall beside the Alabama River, opened in 2024, is inscribed with 122,000 of what?

Surnames adopted by freed people come from the 1870 census, the first chance formerly enslaved families had to register a name of their own choosing.

How long did McMillian's 1988 capital murder trial last before the jury returned its verdict?

A day and a half was all it took, with no physical evidence, against a defendant with no prior felony convictions.

Which illness overtook Walter McMillian before his death in 2013?

Dementia set in early, and it is believed to have been brought on by the trauma of the six years he spent on death row.

What was Walter McMillian's trade, which he built into a modest business with his own equipment?

Pulpwood cutting had made McMillian self-employed and known across the community, but the business did not survive his six years in prison.

Which museum did EJI open in Montgomery in 2018, the same day as its national memorial?

The Legacy Museum moved in 2021 to a larger home on the site of a cotton warehouse where enslaved people had been forced to work.

Which body, hearing McMillian's fifth appeal in 1993, reversed his conviction 5–0 and ordered a new trial?

The Court of Criminal Appeals had rejected four earlier appeals; a week later a circuit judge dismissed every charge and McMillian walked free.