Just Mercy Trivia
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48 free Just Mercy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 48 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.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
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, which had pledged to adopt the inclusion rider, a contract clause demanding diverse casts and crews, on all its projects.
Q 02Which actor plays the wrongly convicted Walter McMillian in the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Jamie Foxx
Jamie Foxx plays a real man: Walter McMillian spent six years condemned in Alabama before every charge against him was dismissed in 1993.
Q 03Walter McMillian was convicted of a murder committed 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; Alabama judges did so about a hundred times before the state became the last to abolish it in 2017.
Q 06Which Just Mercy co-writer and director went on to make his first superhero film for Marvel?
Destin Daniel Cretton
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.
Q 07Which actor plays Eva Ansley, who runs the Equal Justice Initiative's office with Stevenson, 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 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 11Which career criminal, the state's only claimed eyewitness, was indicted alongside McMillian and testified against him?
Ralph Myers
Ralph Myers pleaded guilty as a conspirator and took a 30-year term, while McMillian, the man he accused, was sent to death row.
Q 12The trial judge who sentenced McMillian to death bore the name of which Confederate general?
Robert E. Lee
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.
Q 13Stevenson took McMillian's story to which TV newsmagazine in the fall of 1992 to build public pressure?
60 Minutes
Q 21Just Mercy opened in just four US theaters on which holiday in 2019, to qualify for that season's awards?
Christmas Day
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.
Q 22Just Mercy earned an A+ from which firm that polls opening-night moviegoers?
CinemaScore
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.
Q 23Just Mercy won Outstanding Motion Picture at which ceremony in February 2020, where both its leads also won?
NAACP Image Awards
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.
Q 14After graduating in 1985, Stevenson joined which 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 15Which 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 16Which 2010 ruling, two years before Miller, barred life without parole for juveniles in non-homicide cases?
Graham v. Florida
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.
Q 17Which Stevenson client, freed from Alabama's death row 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 18In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, 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 19On 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 20Just Mercy had its world premiere in September 2019 at which film festival, three months before its US release?
Toronto
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.
The NAACP Image Awards honoured Just Mercy six weeks after Oscar voters had passed it over without a single nomination.
Q 24Besides being its subject, what credited role did Bryan Stevenson himself take on the 2019 film Just Mercy?
Executive producer
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.
Q 25Walter McMillian was convicted of killing an 18-year-old clerk at what kind of business?
A dry cleaner's
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.
Q 26Which Straight Outta Compton star plays McMillian's death-row neighbour in the 2019 film Just Mercy?
O'Shea Jackson Jr.
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.
Q 27Which 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 district attorney, who had defended the conviction on appeal before joining the defence in asking that every charge be dropped.
Q 28What did McMillian's lawyers find on the flip side of the state witness's taped 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 29Which American Library Association prize for nonfiction did Just Mercy win in 2015, a year after publication?
Andrew Carnegie Medal
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.
Q 30Which Nobel Peace laureate, praising the memoir, has likened Bryan Stevenson to Nelson Mandela?
Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu also profiled Stevenson for Vanity Fair, writing that 'justice needs champions, and Bryan Stevenson is such a champion'.