50 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, one of six production outfits credited on it.

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

Jamie Foxx earned a Screen Actors Guild nomination for supporting actor, the same category the Black Reel Awards nominated him in.

Walter McMillian was tried for a murder 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; nearly seventy Alabama judges used it more than a hundred times before it was scrapped.

Who co-wrote and directed the 2019 film Just Mercy?

Destin Daniel Cretton went straight from Just Mercy to Marvel, directing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings two years later.

Which actor plays Eva Ansley, co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, 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 from Just Mercy 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.

Whose testimony, traded for a lighter sentence in his own pending case, was the entire case against McMillian?

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.

Counting more than a year before his trial, how many years did McMillian spend on Alabama's death row?

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.

How many Black jurors sat on the twelve-person jury that convicted McMillian in a county 86 percent white?

One Black juror sat beside eleven white ones in Baldwin County, and even that jury recommended life rather than death.

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

60 Minutes gave the case national attention months before the appeals court reversed the conviction, and the film restages the interview.

After graduating in 1985, Stevenson joined which Atlanta 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 entitled nearly 100 EJI clients to new sentences, since Florida alone held 77 people serving such terms for non-homicide crimes.

Which death-row neighbour of McMillian, released 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.

After the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, 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's festival premiere on September 6, 2019 put the film in the same autumn awards lane as Joker and Ford v Ferrari.

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

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.

What average grade did opening-weekend audiences polled by CinemaScore give Just Mercy?

A+ put Just Mercy in rare company, and PostTrak found 73 percent of viewers said they would definitely recommend it.

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

The NAACP Image Awards gave Just Mercy four wins, including Outstanding Ensemble Cast, the same night its director lost the writing prize.

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

Executive producer Stevenson kept the film honest enough that a 2024 Stanford study found viewers came away with more empathy for formerly incarcerated people.

Which actor plays Herbert Richardson, the client whose final hours Stevenson promises to attend, in Just Mercy?

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.

Which actor plays McMillian's death-row neighbour, a man freed in 2015 after 28 years, in Just Mercy?

O'Shea Jackson Jr. plays McMillian's former cellmate, a man who spent 28 years on death row before Stevenson got his charges dropped.

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 prosecutor, who said he felt sick about the part he played in keeping McMillian on death row.

What did McMillian's lawyers discover when they flipped over the tape of the state witness's recorded 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 came with an acceptance speech that librarians called the best they had ever heard; Publishers Weekly printed it in full.

Which Nobel Peace laureate, praising the memoir, has called Bryan Stevenson 'America's Nelson Mandela'?

Desmond Tutu wrote that the book reads 'as if America's soul has been put on trial' and should be read by people of conscience in every civilized country.

Which talk-show host wrote in 2020 that Stevenson's 'masterful' memoir guided her understanding of mass incarceration?

Oprah Winfrey put Just Mercy on her list of books that changed her life, the same year it hit number one in combined nonfiction.

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

Starbucks lifted the year-old memoir to number eight, a small bump next to the 230-plus weeks it would later log on the paperback nonfiction list.

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: the audience pledged over a million dollars on the spot to end the jailing of children with adults.

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

They are not mutually exclusive, the memoir argues, and its subtitle, A Story of Justice and Redemption, makes the same pairing.

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 his truck, which two witnesses swore they saw outside the crime scene?

It became a low-rider only later, six months after the crime, yet the witnesses had described a low-rider; both later admitted they lied at trial.

A school board in which state banned the young adult Just Mercy in 2023 for 'Teaching About Controversial Issues'?

Illinois's deputy attorney general later ruled the Yorkville board's closed-door meeting illegal under the state's Open Meetings Act.

Which relative's murder, when Stevenson was 16, helped push him toward becoming a lawyer?

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.

Stevenson studied philosophy and directed the gospel choir at which college in St. Davids, Pennsylvania?

Eastern University, then Eastern College, gave him a 1981 philosophy degree on a scholarship won with straight As in high school.

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

NYU's School of Law is his academic base even though he has lived in Montgomery since 1985 and calls his career incompatible with married life.

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.

EJI's National Monument to Freedom, a 155-foot wall beside the Alabama River, is inscribed with 122,000 of what?

Surnames adopted by freed people come from the 1870 census, the first to list African Americans entirely as free; QR codes let visitors trace a name forward.

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 former Washington Post journalist told the McMillian story in his 1995 book Circumstantial Evidence?

Pete Earley's Circumstantial Evidence came out nineteen years before Stevenson's own account of the same case.

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

Pulpwood cutting kept McMillian working two jobs, with no record beyond a barroom misdemeanor, when the sheriff arrested him in 1987.

Which composer wrote the score for Just Mercy, the 2019 legal drama shot in Montgomery and then Atlanta?

Joel P. West's score sits under a film cut by Nat Sanders and photographed by Brett Pawlak, all working under a $25 million budget.

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.