Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

  Joe was convicted by a six-person jury after a trial that lasted only one day. Opening statements began sometime after 9 A.M., and the jury returned its verdict at 4:55 P.M. Joe’s appointed counsel was later suspended from practice in Florida and never reinstated. The defense lawyer had filed no written pleadings and uttered no more than twelve transcript lines at sentencing. There was a great deal to say that was never said.

  At the time of his arrest in 1989, Joe Sullivan was a thirteen-year-old boy with mental disabilities who read at a first-grade level, had experienced repeated physical abuse by his father, and had suffered severe neglect. His family had disintegrated into what state officials described as “abuse and chaos.” From age ten until his arrest, Joe had no stable home; he had no fewer than ten different addresses within this three-year period. He spent most of his time on the streets, where police stopped him for violations including trespassing, stealing a bike, and property crimes committed with his older brother and other older teens.

  Joe had been brought to court and adjudicated on a single occasion, when he was twelve years old. The juvenile probation officer assigned to Joe’s case attributed his behavior to the fact that “he is easily influenced and associates with the wrong crowd.” She observed that “[i]t is apparent that Joe is a very immature naive person who is a follower rather than a leader” and that he has the potential to “be a positive and productive individual.”

  Joe’s record of mostly misdemeanor-level juvenile incidents—nearly all of which were nonviolent and which did not merit more than a single court adjudication in a two-year period—was viewed differently by the sentencing judge, who concluded that “the juvenile system has been utterly incapable of doing anything with Mr. Sullivan.” The court concluded that Joe had been “given opportunity after opportunity to upright himself and take advantage of the second and third chances he’s been given.” In truth, Joe was never given a second, much less a third, chance to “upright himself,” but he was nonetheless characterized at age thirteen as a “serial” or “violent recidivist” by prosecutors. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  Despite numerous potentially meritorious grounds for appeal, Joe’s appointed appellate counsel filed an Anders brief—indicating his belief that there were no legitimate grounds for appeal and no credible basis to complain about the conviction or sentence—and was permitted to withdraw from representing Joe. Joe, just one year into his own adolescence, was sent to adult prison, where an eighteen-year nightmare began. In prison, he was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted. He attempted suicide on multiple occasions. He developed multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced him into a wheelchair. Doctors later concluded that his neurological disorder might have been triggered by trauma in prison.

  Another inmate housed with Joe wrote to us and described him as disabled, horribly mistreated, and wrongfully condemned to die in prison for a non-homicide crime at thirteen. In 2007, we wrote to Joe and discovered that he had no legal assistance and had spent the previous eighteen years in prison with no one to help him challenge his conviction or sentence. When I received Joe’s response to my letter, a scribbled note in the handwriting of a child, he could still only read at a third-grade level, despite the fact that he was thirty-one. He told me in his letter that he was “okay.” Then he wrote, “If I didn’t do anything, shouldn’t I be able to go home now? Mr. Bryan, if this is true, can you please write me back and come get me?”

  I wrote to Joe that we would look deeper into his case and that we were convinced that he had a credible claim of innocence. We attempted to prove his innocence through a motion for DNA testing, but because the state had destroyed the relevant biological evidence, the motion was denied. Disheartened, we decided to challenge Joe’s death-in-prison sentence as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

  I drove from Montgomery through South Alabama to Florida and then along a tangle of wooded back roads to get to the Santa Rosa Correctional Facility in the town of Milton to meet Joe for the first time. Santa Rosa County borders the Gulf of Mexico at the western end of the Florida Panhandle and had long been known for agriculture. Between 1980 and 2000, the county’s population doubled in size as the coastal areas attracted beach homes and resort properties. Many affluent families left Pensacola for Santa Rosa County, and military families from nearby Eglin Air Force Base settled there. But there was another industry in town—incarceration.

  The Florida Department of Corrections built the prison to house 1,600 people in the 1990s, when America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.

  When I arrived at Santa Rosa, I didn’t encounter any staff who were people of color, although 70 percent of the men incarcerated there were black or brown. This was a bit unusual; I frequently saw black and brown correctional officers at other prisons. I was subjected to an elaborate admission process and given a beeper to activate if I was ever threatened or distressed while inside the prison. I was escorted to a forty-by-forty-foot room where more than two dozen incarcerated men sat sadly while uniformed correctional staff buzzed in and out.

  There were three six-foot-tall metal cages in the corner that couldn’t have been more than four feet by four feet. In all my years of visiting prisons, I had never seen such small cages used to hold a prisoner inside a secure prison. I wondered what danger the caged men presented that they couldn’t sit with the other incarcerated men on the benches. Two young men stood in each of the first two cages. In the third cage, which was wedged into the corner, sat a small man in a wheelchair. His wheelchair faced the back of the cage, so he could not look out into the room. I couldn’t see his face, but I was certain it was Joe. A correctional officer was constantly walking into the room and calling out a name, prompting one of the men to get up from his bench and follow the officer down a hallway where he would meet with an assistant warden or whomever they were scheduled to see. Finally, the officer called out, “Joe Sullivan, legal visit.” I walked over to the man and said that I was the attorney for the legal visit. He summoned two officers, who went to Joe’s cage to unlock it. The cage was so small that when they tried to remove Joe’s wheelchair, the spokes on the chair got caught on the cage, and they couldn’t budge it.

  I stood there watching for several minutes while more officers got involved in an increasingly elaborate effort to dislodge Joe’s wheelchair from the tight cage. They pulled up on the wheelchair. Then they pushed down on the chair, raising the front off the ground, but this didn’t work, either. They tugged at the chair with loud grunts and tried to force it free, but it was completely stuck.

  Two inmate trustees who had been mopping the floor stopped to watch the officers struggle with the wheelchair and the cage. They finally offered to help out, even though no one had asked for their input. The officers silently accepted the assistance of the inmates, but none of them could come up with a solution. As the staff became more frustrated by their inability to get Joe out of the cage, there was talk of using pliers and hacksaws, of putting the cage on its side with Joe in it. Someone suggested trying to lift Joe from his wheelchair to remove
him without the chair, but both Joe and the chair were packed so tightly into the cage that no one could get in to move him.

  I asked the guards why he was in the cage in the first place, which prompted a brusque response: “Lifer. All lifers have to be moved with higher security protocols.”

  I couldn’t see Joe’s face while all of this was going on, but I could hear him crying. He occasionally made a whining sound, and his shoulders jerked up and down. When the staff proposed turning the cage on its side, he moaned audibly. Finally, the prisoner trustees suggested lifting the cage and tilting it slightly, which everyone agreed to try. The two trustees lifted and tilted the heavy cage, while three officers yanked Joe’s chair with a violent pull that finally dislodged it. The guards gave each other high fives, the inmate trustees walked away silently, and Joe sat motionlessly in his chair in the middle of the room, looking down at his feet.

  I walked over to him and introduced myself. His face was tear-stained, and his eyes were red, but he looked up at me and began clapping his hands giddily. “Yeah! Yeah! Mr. Bryan.” He smiled and offered me both of his hands, which I took.

  I wheeled Joe to a cramped office for our legal visit. He continued cheering quietly and kept clapping his hands in excitement. I had to argue with the attending prison guard for permission to close the door and talk confidentially with Joe. The officer eventually relented. Joe seemed to relax when I closed the door. Despite the terrifying start to the visit, he was extremely cheerful. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was talking to a young child.

  I explained to Joe how disappointed we were that the State had destroyed the biological evidence that might have allowed us to prove he was innocent through DNA testing. We had discovered that both the victim and one of his co-defendants had died. The other co-defendant would not say anything about what had really happened, making it extremely difficult for us to challenge Joe’s conviction. I then offered our new idea about challenging his sentence as unconstitutional, which might create another way for him to possibly go home. He smiled throughout my explanation, although it was clear he didn’t understand all of it. He had a legal pad on his lap, and when I finished he told me that he had prepared some questions for our visit.

  During the entire visit I kept thinking about how he was much more enthusiastic and excited than I had expected him to be, given his history. When he told me about the questions he had prepared for me, he was practically bubbling. He explained that if he ever got out of prison he might want to be a reporter so “I can tell people what’s really going on.” He spoke with great pride when he announced that he was ready to ask his questions.

  “Joe, I’ll be happy to answer your questions. Fire away.”

  He read with some difficulty.

  “Do you have children?” He looked up at me expectantly.

  “No, I don’t have children. I have nieces and nephews, though.”

  “What is your favorite color?” He once again smiled eagerly.

  I chuckled, since I don’t have a favorite color. But I wanted to respond to him.

  “Brown.”

  “Okay, my last question is the most important.” He looked up at me briefly with big eyes and smiled. He then became serious and read his question.

  “Who is your favorite cartoon character?” He was beaming when he looked at me.

  “Please, tell the truth. I really want to know.”

  I couldn’t think of anything and had to force myself to keep smiling. “Wow, Joe, I honestly don’t know. Can I think about that and get back to you? I’ll write you with my answer.” He nodded enthusiastically.

  Over the next three months I received a flood of scrawled letters from Joe, one almost every day. The letters were usually short statements about what he’d eaten that day or what show he’d seen on television. Sometimes they were just two or three Bible verses he had copied. He would always ask me to write him back and let him know if his handwriting was improving. Sometimes the letters contained only a few words or a single question like, “Do you have friends?”

  We filed a petition to challenge Joe’s sentence as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. We knew that there would be procedural objections to filing it nearly twenty years after his sentencing, but we thought the Supreme Court’s recent decision banning the death penalty for juveniles could provide a basis for relief. In 2005, the Court recognized that differences between children and adults required that kids be shielded from the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment. My staff and I discussed how we might use the constitutional reasoning that banned the execution of children as a legal basis for challenging juvenile life-without-parole sentences.

  We filed similar challenges to life-without-parole sentences in several other cases involving children, including Ian Manuel’s case. Ian was still being held in solitary confinement in Florida. We filed cases in Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Delaware, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and South Dakota. We filed a case in Pennsylvania to help Trina Garnett, the girl who had been convicted for arson. She was still struggling at the women’s prison but was excited about the possibility of our doing something to change her sentence. We filed a case in California for Antonio Nuñez.

  We filed two cases in Alabama. Ashley Jones was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been convicted of killing two family members when her older boyfriend tried to help her escape her family. Ashley suffered from a horrific history of abuse and neglect. When she was still a teenager serving her sentence at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, she started writing to me to ask about various legal decisions she’d read about in the newspaper. She never asked for legal assistance; she simply asked about what she’d read and expressed interest in the law and our work. She started sending notes congratulating me and EJI whenever we won a death penalty appeal. When we decided to challenge death-in-prison sentences imposed on children, I told her we might be able to finally challenge her sentence. She was thrilled.

  Evan Miller was another fourteen-year-old condemned to die in prison in Alabama. Evan is from a poor white family in North Alabama. His difficult life was punctuated by suicide attempts that started at age seven when he was in elementary school. His parents were abusive and had drug addiction problems, so he was in and out of foster care, but he was living with his mother at the time of the crime. A middle-aged neighbor, Cole Cannon, had come over one night seeking to buy drugs from Evan’s mother. The fourteen-year-old Evan and his sixteen-year-old friend went to the man’s house with him to play cards. Cannon gave the teens drugs and played drinking games with them. At one point, he sent the boys out to buy more drugs. The boys returned and stayed over as it got later and later. Eventually the boys thought Cannon had passed out and tried to steal his wallet. Cannon was startled awake and jumped on Evan. The older boy responded by hitting the man in the head with a bat. Both boys started beating him and then set his trailer on fire. Cole Cannon died, and Evan and his friend were charged with capital murder. The older boy made a deal with prosecutors and got a parole-eligible life sentence, while Evan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

  I got involved in Evan’s case right after his trial and filed a motion to reduce his sentence, even though it was the mandatory punishment for someone convicted of capital murder who was too young to be executed. At a hearing, I asked the judge to reconsider Evan’s sentence in light of his age. The prosecutor argued, “I think he should be executed. He deserves the death penalty.” He then lamented that the law no longer authorized the execution of children because he just couldn’t wait to put this fourteen-year-old boy in the electric chair and kill him. The judge denied our motion.

  When I visited Evan at the jail, we would have long talks. He loved to talk about anything he could think of when we were together to extend our visits. We talked about sports and exercise, we talked about books, we talked about his family, we talked about music, we talked about all the things he wanted to do when he grew up. He was usually animated
and excited about something, although when he didn’t hear from his family for a while or had to deal with some bad incident at the prison, he would become extremely depressed. He couldn’t understand some of the hostile and violent behavior he saw from prisoners and the other people around him. He once told me that a guard had punched him in the chest just because he had asked a question about meal times. He started crying as he told me this because he just couldn’t understand why the officer had done that.

  Evan was sent to the St. Clair Correctional Facility, a maximum-security adult prison. Not long after he first arrived, he was attacked by another prisoner, who stabbed him nine times. He recovered without serious physical problems but was traumatized by the experience and disoriented by the violence. When he talked about his own act of violence, he seemed deeply confused about how it was possible he could have done something so destructive.

  Most of the juvenile lifer cases we handled involved clients who shared Evan’s confusion about their adolescent behavior. Many had matured into adults who were much more thoughtful and reflective; they were now capable of making responsible and appropriate decisions. Almost all of the cases involved condemned people marked by the tragic irony that they were now nothing like the confused children who had committed a violent crime; they had all changed in some significant way. This made them distinct from most of my clients who committed crimes as adults. That I was involved in the cases of teens who’d committed violent crimes was itself ironic.

  I was sixteen years old, living in southern Delaware. I was headed outside one day when our phone rang. I watched my mother answer it as I strolled past her. A minute later I heard her scream inside the house. I ran back inside and saw her lying on the floor, sobbing, “Daddy, Daddy” while the phone’s receiver dangled from its base. I picked it up; my aunt was on the line. She told me that my grandfather had been murdered.