Contact the library (rochesterpubliclibraryVT@gmail.com) for a copy of the book and sign up for the book discussion via ZOOM.

Just Mercy, is the memoir of attorney Bryan Stevenson who has spent his life advocating for the poor and wrongly accused.

Stevenson has been awarded both the Right Livelihood Award and the Global Citizen of the Year awards in 2020 for his work.

In 1989, the author founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, a state with some of the harshest, most rigid capital punishment laws in the country. Underfunded and chronically overloaded by requests for help, his organization works on behalf of men, women and children who, for reasons of race, mental illness, lack of money had been victimized by the American justice system.

One of Stevenson's first and most significant cases involved a black man named Walter McMillian. Wrongly accused of the murder of a white woman, McMillian found himself on death row. His story became the Hollywood movie, Just Mercy (2019)