'Just Mercy' Recommended Reading for Compassionate St. Augustine's Month of Criminal Justice & Prison Reform

On January 25, 2016 at the request of Compassionate St. Augustine, the St. Augustine City Commission proclaimed February a Month of Criminal Justice & Prison Reform Awareness.  The proclamation encourages residents of the city and St. Johns County to attend several related events and to read and discuss Bryan Stevenson's best-selling and award-winning book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption individually or in groups.

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, Esquire, and Time, Stevenson's powerful true story is a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice and explore the potential for mercy to redeem us personally and as a nation.  In 2015, Just Mercy was awaded the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction; the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction; a Books for a Better Life Award, and it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize; r the Kirkus Reviews Prize, and an American Library Association Notable Book.

Today, Stevenson is acclaimed as one of the most influential and brilliant lawyers of the 21st century.  In the 1980s, he was a young, unknown lawyer in Alabama, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative –– a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his under-standing of mercy and justice forever.

EJI recently won an historic ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional.  Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of its founder's passion for justice from the time he was an idealistic, gifted young lawyer coming of age whose efforts to transform the alarming need for criminal justice system and prison reform awareness l are taking root locally, statewide and nationally.

Compassionate St. Augustine has organized several book groups that will be reading Just Mercy.  For more information and/or a template for forming a book group please contact us at: compassionatestaugustine@gmail.org