This is a memoir of a man who dedicated his professional life as a lawyer to trying to help people on death row and others with unjust sentences of life imprisonment. Stevenson explains that poor black people and people with mental diability are much more likely to end up on death row than average white people are. He recounts several cases when people were convicted of crimes on little evidence, just because they were convenient and helpless scapegoats for police trying to pin a crime on someone. Other of the people he describes were imprisoned as juveniles and spent their whole adult life in prison with no chance of parole. Still others he tried to help were women who had still born babies, but were convicted of killing their infants. It is a heart wrending story told with honest and accessible prose.
I read this book because I had read several fluffy novels in a row and thought I was ready for something a little more serious. It was super serious, but I am glad I read it. I thought it was interesting that he clamed that black people in the US had gone through four kinds/periods of oppression; inslavement up until the civil war, Jim Crow laws until the mid 1900's, civil rights struggles of the mid1900's and mass imprisonment starting in the 1970's. In my mind I knew that blacks were over-represented in prisons, but I had never put it on a similar level of oppression as enslavement or Jim Crow laws. The story of Stevenson's strugglesto find justice for wrongfully imprisoned black people at least suggests it is a problem much bigger than most people think. The book has been made into a motion picture, and as a result it is on the top of the Overdrive checkout lists right now. (2014, 336 p.)
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