the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. (Location 227)
Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. (Location 231)
Presumptions of guilt, poverty, racial bias, and a host of other social, structural, and political dynamics have created a system that is defined by error, (Location 255)
Walter’s experience taught me how our system traumatizes and victimizes people when we exercise our power to convict and condemn irresponsibly—not (Location 268)
Walter grew up understanding how forbidden it was for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, (Location 393)
may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, (Location 432)
Alabama’s state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986 when Walter met Karen Kelly. Section (Location 442)
In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. (Location 517)
Some prisoners were tortured with electric cattle prods as punishment for violations of the prison’s rule. Inmates at some facilities would be chained to “hitching posts,” their arms fastened above their heads in a painful position where they’d be forced to stand for hours. The practice, which wasn’t declared unconstitutional until 2002, (Location 541)
I decided to talk to youth groups, churches, and community organizations about the challenges posed by the presumption of guilt assigned to the poor and people of color. I (Location 674)
“People think these are my scars, cuts, and bruises.” For the first time I noticed that his eyes were wet with tears. He placed his hands on his head. “These aren’t my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor.” (Location 706)
Alabama law had outlawed nonprocreative sex, so officials planned to arrest McMillian on sodomy charges. On June 7, 1987, Sheriff Tate led (Location 718)
Pearson was determined to leave office with a victory and likely saw the prosecution of Walter McMillian as one of the most important cases of his career. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys (Location 885)
Like Tate, Pearson had heard from many black residents that they believed Walter McMillian was innocent. But Pearson was confident he could win a guilty verdict despite the suspect testimony of Ralph Myers and Bill Hooks (Location 891)
His one lingering concern may have been a recent United States Supreme Court case that threatened a longstanding feature of high-profile criminal trials in the South: the all-white jury. (Location 893)
But when the nearly all-white jury pronounced him guilty, after fifteen months of waiting for vindication, (Location 988)
Lindsey received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole from his jury, but the judge had “overridden” it and imposed a death sentence on his own. Death sentences resulting from “judge override” were an anomaly, even back in 1989. (Location 1058)
By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. (Location 1142)
Alabama’s capital statute requires that any murder eligible for the death penalty be intentional, but it was clear that Herbert had no intent to kill the child. (Location 1177)
Alabama’s statute at the time limited what court-appointed lawyers could be paid for their out-of-court preparation time to $1,000, so the lawyer spent almost no time on the case. The trial lasted just over (Location 1182)
a day, and the judge quickly condemned Herbert to death. (Location 1184)
Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence. (Location 1203)
“All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke up this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’ This evening, ‘What do you want for your meal, how can we help you?’ ‘Do (Location 1371)
The prison officials had pumped themselves up to carry out the execution with determination and resolve, but even they revealed extreme discomfort and some measure of shame. (Location 1384)
I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves. (Location 1396)
“It would have been so much easier if he had been out in the woods hunting by himself when that girl was killed.” (Location 1406)
What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?” (Location 1419)
Even in the transcript, the law enforcement officers who had investigated Walter seemed lawless. These police put Walter on death row while he was a pretrial detainee; I feared that they would not scrupulously follow the legal requirement to turn over all exculpatory evidence that could help him prove his innocence. (Location 1466)
I thought of the story in a whole new way. I had never before considered how devastated John’s community must have felt after his lynching. Things would become so much harder for the people who had given everything to help make John a teacher. (Location 1547)
“No, sir. I haven’t heard from any of them. They just came and arrested me and told me I had been indicted for perjury.” (Location 1651)
but it was clear that he was locked into this narrative just like everyone else who had been involved. (Location 1728)
Many states had changed their laws to make it easier to prosecute children as adults, and my clients were getting younger and younger. (Location 1768)
He looked back at her, mirroring her contempt and disgust, and in a flash, he punched her hard in the face. She didn’t expect him to hit her so quickly or violently—he hadn’t done it like that before. She collapsed to the floor with the crush of his blow. Charlie was standing behind his mother and saw her head slam against their metal kitchen counter as she fell. (Location 1798)
“They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” (Location 1976)
said glumly. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.” (Location 1976)
Sheriff Tate only had one thing on his mind. He just kept saying, ‘Why you want to sleep with niggers? (Location 2108)
The problem was that not all crime victims received the same treatment. (Location 2142)
In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional. The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. (Location 2151)
Millions of state and federal dollars were authorized to create advocacy groups for crime victims in each state. States found countless ways for individual victims in particular crimes to become decision makers and participants. (Location 2161)
A new formula emerged for criminal prosecution, especially in high-profile cases, in which the emotions, perspectives, and opinions of the victim figured prominently in how criminal cases would be managed. (Location 2171)
focusing on the status of the victim became one more way for the criminal justice system to disfavor some people. (Location 2173)
The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. (Location 2177)
The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others. (Location 2184)
Not long after she arrived at Muncy, a male correctional officer pulled her into a secluded area and raped her. (Location 2300)
Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. (Location 2309)
After communicating with Ian for several years, Baigre wrote the court and told the judge who sentenced Ian of her conviction that his sentence was too harsh and that his conditions of confinement were inhumane. She tried to talk to prison officials and gave interviews to the press to draw attention to Ian’s plight. “No one knows more than I do how destructive and reckless Ian’s crime was. But what we’re currently doing to him is mean and irresponsible,” she told one reporter. (Location 2343)
In the federal system, adults who unintentionally commit arson-murder where more than one person is killed usually receive sentences that permit release in less than twenty-five years. Many adults convicted of attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. (Location 2393)
George’s white court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, called no witnesses. (Location 2418)
theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” (Location 2437)
“[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than youths in earlier years.” (Location 2447)
“When I saw that dog, I thought about 1965, when we gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and tried to march for our voting rights. They beat us and put those dogs on us.” She looked back to me sadly. “I tried to move, Attorney Stevenson, I wanted to move, but I just couldn’t do it.” (Location 2753)
“I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. (Location 2785)
in public schools was declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, that many Southern states erected Confederate flags atop their state government buildings. Confederate monuments, memorials, and imagery proliferated throughout the South during the Civil Rights Era. (Location 2958)
of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry. I made it to eighteen, joined the military, and you know, I’ve been okay. But sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.” (Location 3086)
was locked into a maintenance role: He was a custodian for the system who was unlikely to overturn the previous judgment, even if there was compelling evidence of innocence. What (Location 3139)
People in the black community were thrilled to see honest coverage of the case. They had been whispering about Walter’s wrongful conviction for years. The case had so traumatized the black (Location 3268)
if she could have afforded an examination, a doctor would have found signs of placental abruption. (Location 3527)
But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. (Location 3579)
Some jurors indicated that they found allegations of killing a child so disturbing that they could not honor the presumption of innocence. (Location 3614)
Prior to rendering a verdict, jurors expressed concerns about Mrs. Colbey being subject to the death penalty, so the State agreed not to pursue an execution if she was found guilty. This concession yielded an immediate conviction. (Location 3621)
In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The (Location 3645)
prosecution and conviction. Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time of Walter’s release, only ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. (Location 3760)
In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court again reinforced the protections that shield prosecutors from accountability. (Location 3793)
The Florida Department of Corrections built the prison to house 1,600 people in the 1990s, when America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the (Location 3985)
In 2005, the Court recognized that differences between children and adults required that kids be shielded from the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment. (Location 4048)
Soon, Walter needed to be moved into the sort of facility that provided care for the elderly and infirm. Most places wouldn’t take him because he had been convicted of a felony. Even when we explained that he was wrongfully convicted and later proved innocent, we couldn’t get anyone to admit him. (Location 4231)
By 2010, the number of annual executions fell to less than half the number in 1999. (Location 4300)
Antonio Nuñez at a remote prison in the middle of the (Location 4336)
so most of his legal claims were procedurally barred because he had missed the filing deadlines. (Location 4353)
He would never have been convicted of capital murder if he had just had the money for a decent lawyer. (Location 4409)
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. (Location 4445)
what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. (Location 4464)
The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration. (Location 4520)
He was given a mandatory death-in-prison sentence after his jury was illegally told that he had to prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and the State introduced impermissible evidence. He was resentenced to a finite term of years and now has hope for release. (Location 4547)
Mr. Hinton’s appointed defense lawyer got only $500 from the court to retain a gun expert to confront the state’s case, so he ended up with a mechanical engineer who was blind in one eye and who had almost no experience testifying as a gun expert. (Location 4562)
I was encouraged by the fact that nationwide the rate of mass incarceration had finally slowed. For the first time in close to forty years, the country’s prison population did not increase in 2011. In 2012, the United States saw the first decline in its prison population in decades. (Location 4571)
issues; I believe that so much of our worst thinking about justice is steeped in the myths of racial difference that still plague us. (Location 4583)
but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. (Location 4616)
Overwhelmed judges tried to manage the proceedings with bench meetings while dozens of young men—most of whom were black—sat handcuffed in standard jail-issued orange jumpsuits in the front of the court. Lawyers consulted with clients and family members scattered around the chaotic courtroom. (Location 4675)
The judge detailed Mr. Caston’s forty-five years at Angola for a non-homicide crime when he was sixteen. She noted that Caston had been sent to Angola in the 1960s. Then the judge pronounced a new sentence that meant Mr. Caston would immediately be released from prison. (Location 4695)
I looked at Carol and smiled. Then the people in the silent courtroom did something I’d never seen before: They erupted in applause. The defense lawyers, prosecutors, family members, and (Location 4697)
deputy sheriffs applauded. Even the inmates applauded in their handcuffs. (Location 4699)
People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.” (Location 4795)
