why you should see Just Mercy (free to rent in June 2020)

Just Mercy is available to rent for free for the rest of June on rental platforms: iTunes, Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Playstation, Microsoft, FandangoNow.

I’d highly recommend this film. It tells the story of Bryan Stevenson (pictured below), a lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, “committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”

It’s a humanizing portrayal of people wrongly imprisoned and sentenced to death, and people who were guilty but so full of life beyond their crime, and shines a light on how every piece of the justice system has harmed Black people. Stevenson believes that people should never be defined by the worst thing they have done. As he said in the film, “whatever you did, your life is still meaningful.” He reframes the question of “do people deserve to die for the crime they committed?” to “do we deserve to kill?” and explains that a society that treats rich guilty people better than poor innocent people does not deserve to decide who lives and dies. He believes all the money spent on jail and…