Just Mercy

With this cold or cedar fever, about all I do is watch movies and sleep.  Yesterday, I watched "Just Mercy," in which Jamie Foxx plays (brilliantly) a falsely convicted prisoner on death row.

A young African American lawyer from Baltimore takes on his case and others--along with a female activist against capital punishment in Monroeville, the hometown of  Harper Lee.

The lawyer and the prisoner share similar backgrounds in poverty.  "It could have been me," he said when he heard about the trumped up charges in the court case in which the man had been convicted: no physical evidence, just the forced testimony of one felon.  But before he even went to court, he had spent a year on death row!

(Six years later, the felon recants his testimony--but the judge refuses to be moved by it.)

The cumulative prejudice and bias of law enforcement, even lawyers and judges, favored "getting some justice for the white victim" over facts and evidence.  Any black man was at risk of random arrest.   "He just looked like he did it," one sheriff said of another inmate on death row.

I cringed every time I saw the bigoted powers-that-be refuse to hear evidence and face the truth--echoing what is happening in the Republican Senate right now regarding the impeachment "trial."

I cringed that the stereotypical racist sheriffs were Souherners--in the next door state to my home state.  But I have seen the type; we all have--and not just in the Southern states.

On the day of his execution, one of the African American inmates says, "People have been nicer to me today than all the rest of the days of my life."  He requests "The Old Rugged Cross" to be played during the execution.  The other inmates clang metal objects on the bars as their friend is being executed.  This scene is excruciating to watch.

One can't help wondering how many fewer acts of violence might be conducted if individuals and the culture-at-large were "nicer" to young boys who grow up in poverty.

This is a film that's impossible to forget.  It's profoundly moving--a film about one man willing to take risks to make a dent in injustice and racial prejudice.