Dolphins. They were everywhere. Springing and spraying in and out of an undulating tangerine sea set ablaze by a fiery-gold sun. An oceanic dreamscape with splashing dolphins and soaring seabirds doing what they do while the summer sun burns and drips smooth as honey. Such a scene is what a visual artist painted after she visited a prisoner on death row in California and asked him what he thought about from one grey day to the next. He mentioned thinking about a number of things while behind bars. Thinks he should never have committed his crime. Any crime. No time. Though he mostly thought about dolphins and seabirds soaring and splashing in and over the deep blue sea. Perhaps the image represented freedom in its truest form to the prisoner. Freedom in its most elemental state. Freedom in the abstract. Freedom without contract. Freedom that does not detract nor subtract but is pure and simple and intact. Just freedom.
This freedom is illusive for many, particularly those on death row, particularly those who have not committed the crime they were found guilty of. These are some of the people that Bryan Stevenson writes about in his book Just Mercy.
Just Mercy is a searing story of crime and punishment in America where the crime was not committed by the person who received the punishment. A familiar story, of course, told many times and untold just as many more. In a perfect world the scales of justice would balance. Yet the winds of imperfection are always blowing through human affairs and gust harshest through the corridors of the criminal justice system. Buffeted and nearly knocked to the ground by these gale force winds is Walter McMillian, a Black man on death row for allegedly killing a White woman in the state of Alabama.
Mr. McMillian prayed mightily for a lawyer to help him regain his freedom and his prayers were answered in the form of Stevenson, a Harvard-educated attorney with a deep sense of decency and remarkable strength of character. Mr. McMillian, was set to walk the green mile toward the guillotine, or some new method of administrative murder meant to add a modern gloss to history’s most primitive punishment. If Mr. Stevenson fails, he dies. State-sanctioned killings are thought to deter others. But history shows that that thought is not well-founded. Long ago pickpockets were hanged in England, and while spectators watched the unlucky pickpocket swing from a rope, other pickpockets—obviously undeterred— milled about and worked the crowd.
Sadly, there are many Walter McMillians who never had the benefit of a Bryan Stevenson to get them off death row, out of prison, and away from wild winds and rains and under the umbrella of a second chance. Too many Walter McMillians never even came close to being rescued. And for all the never rescued, one can only hope they were able to hold fast to a bright and sunny image, or the words in a book that brought them to another place, until they face their next chapter.