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50 free Just Mercy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Just Mercy is the rare set text that is also a thriller. Bryan Stevenson's memoir follows a young lawyer into Alabama's death row and the case of Walter McMillian, a man convicted of a murder that dozens of people watched him not commit. The 2019 film put that story on screen with two of the biggest stars of their generation and sent the book back to number one five years after it came out. These 50 questions cover both. From the memoir: how the chapters are built, who Stevenson is and where he came from, the organisation he founded, the Supreme Court rulings on children sentenced as adults, the book's best-known line and the prizes it collected. From the film: who plays whom, who directed it, where it premiered, how it was released and what audiences and award voters made of it. It suits a class that has just finished the book, a book club pairing the memoir with the film, or anyone who wants to check how much of the story they really remember. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a group.
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Q 01Which actor plays defence lawyer Bryan Stevenson in the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Michael B. Jordan
Michael B. Jordan also produced the film through his company Outlier Society, one of six production outfits credited on it.
Q 02Which actor plays the wrongly convicted Walter McMillian in the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Jamie Foxx
Jamie Foxx earned a Screen Actors Guild nomination for supporting actor, the same category the Black Reel Awards nominated him in.
Q 03Walter McMillian was tried for a murder in which small Alabama town, best known as Harper Lee's home?
Monroeville
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.
Q 04Dozens of witnesses, including a police officer, saw McMillian at what event when the 1986 murder took place?
A church fish fry
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.
Q 05McMillian's jury voted for life, yet he was sentenced to death under which now-abolished Alabama practice?
Judicial override
Judicial override let an elected trial judge replace a jury's life verdict with death; nearly seventy Alabama judges used it more than a hundred times before it was scrapped.
Q 06Who co-wrote and directed the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Destin Daniel Cretton
Destin Daniel Cretton went straight from Just Mercy to Marvel, directing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings two years later.
Q 07Which actor plays Eva Ansley, co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, in the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Brie Larson
Brie Larson was reuniting with her Short Term 12 and Glass Castle director, making Just Mercy their third film together.
Q 08Bryan Stevenson earned both a law degree and a public policy master's in 1985 from which university?
Harvard
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.
Q 09Stevenson put the entire prize from which 1995 award into keeping the Equal Justice Initiative running?
MacArthur Fellowship
The MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, arrived just after Congress cut funding for the death-penalty defence centres Stevenson had been running.
Q 10How does Stevenson's best-known line from Just Mercy end: 'Each of us is more than...'?
the worst thing we've ever done
'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.
Q 11Whose testimony, traded for a lighter sentence in his own pending case, was the entire case against McMillian?
Ralph Myers
Ralph Myers later admitted he knew nothing about the crime and had been told what to say by officers who threatened him with a death sentence.
Q 12Counting more than a year before his trial, how many years did McMillian spend on Alabama's death row?
Six
Six years, because the sheriff sent him straight to death row at Holman Prison on arrest, before any jury had heard a word of evidence.
Q 13How many Black jurors sat on the twelve-person jury that convicted McMillian in a county 86 percent white?
One
One Black juror sat beside eleven white ones in Baldwin County, and even that jury recommended life rather than death.
Q 21Just Mercy had its world premiere in September 2019 at which film festival, three months before its US release?
Toronto
Toronto's festival premiere on September 6, 2019 put the film in the same autumn awards lane as Joker and Ford v Ferrari.
Q 22Just Mercy opened in just four US theaters on which holiday in 2019, to qualify for that season's awards?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day brought in $81,072 from those four screens; the wide release followed on January 10, 2020, when the film opened in 2,375 theaters.
Q 23What average grade did opening-weekend audiences polled by CinemaScore give Just Mercy?
A+
A+ put Just Mercy in rare company, and PostTrak found 73 percent of viewers said they would definitely recommend it.
Q 14Stevenson took McMillian's story to which TV newsmagazine in the fall of 1992 to build public pressure?
60 Minutes
60 Minutes gave the case national attention months before the appeals court reversed the conviction, and the film restages the interview.
Q 15After graduating in 1985, Stevenson joined which Atlanta death-penalty defence group, run by Stephen Bright?
Southern Center for Human Rights
The Southern Center for Human Rights assigned Stevenson to Alabama, the posting that led him to found his own organization there four years later.
Q 16Which 2005 Supreme Court ruling, ending the death penalty for under-18 crimes, opened EJI's juvenile campaign?
Roper v. Simmons
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.
Q 17Which 2010 ruling, two years before Miller, barred life without parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases?
Graham v. Florida
Graham v. Florida entitled nearly 100 EJI clients to new sentences, since Florida alone held 77 people serving such terms for non-homicide crimes.
Q 18Which death-row neighbour of McMillian, released in 2015 after nearly three decades, wrote The Sun Does Shine?
Anthony Ray Hinton
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.
Q 19After the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, which distributor made Just Mercy free to stream for a month?
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. had only picked up the film in 2017 after its original studio, Broad Green Pictures, went bankrupt mid-development.
Q 20On which holiday in 2020 did TBS, TNT and truTV air Just Mercy back to back with Black Panther?
Juneteenth
Juneteenth was the hook for a social-justice broadcast whose interviews included Stevenson and Senator Kamala Harris.
Q 24Just Mercy won Outstanding Motion Picture at which ceremony in February 2020, where both its leads also won?
NAACP Image Awards
The NAACP Image Awards gave Just Mercy four wins, including Outstanding Ensemble Cast, the same night its director lost the writing prize.
Q 25Besides being its subject, what credited role did Bryan Stevenson himself take on the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Executive producer
Executive producer Stevenson kept the film honest enough that a 2024 Stanford study found viewers came away with more empathy for formerly incarcerated people.
Q 26Which actor plays Herbert Richardson, the client whose final hours Stevenson promises to attend, in Just Mercy?
Rob Morgan
Rob Morgan's Richardson gives the film its most wrenching thread, a client whose Supreme Court appeal is denied while the McMillian fight is still under way.
Q 27Which actor plays McMillian's death-row neighbour, a man freed in 2015 after 28 years, in Just Mercy?
O'Shea Jackson Jr.
O'Shea Jackson Jr. plays McMillian's former cellmate, a man who spent 28 years on death row before Stevenson got his charges dropped.
Q 28Which English actor plays Tommy Chapman, the district attorney who finally joins the motion to free McMillian?
Rafe Spall
Rafe Spall's Chapman is drawn from the real prosecutor, who said he felt sick about the part he played in keeping McMillian on death row.
Q 29What did McMillian's lawyers discover when they flipped over the tape of the state witness's recorded confession?
Him protesting being made to lie
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.
Q 30Which American Library Association prize for nonfiction did Just Mercy win in 2015, a year after publication?
Andrew Carnegie Medal
The Andrew Carnegie Medal came with an acceptance speech that librarians called the best they had ever heard; Publishers Weekly printed it in full.