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I'm glad Stevenson wrote it, and I'm glad I read it. He certainly paints a vivid picture of justice, and especially injustice in America. He emphasizes how race affects outcomes in the justice system, but also notes the impact of poverty generally. He takes people many would think of as monsters and makes them human for his readers. He is modest and the work does not come off as a bragging memoir. While it is not often a page-turner, it is not highly technical or otherwise difficult to read.
All of those things said, I am not sure Stevenson changed my mind about a great many things. I already had grown reluctant about the death penalty myself, so I am not sure if I was sympathetic toward the picture he painted of capital punishment because of his story, or because I was already there anyway. In some other areas, I think he undermines his intention with lawyerly double speak and rhetorical tricks. For instance, he tells of the three days and nights of beatings and gang rapes a 14-year-old boy suffers when placed in a jail for adults. He rightly holds the authorities accountable for doing such a thing, but says nothing about the accountability of the many men who chose to perpetrate these crimes upon the boy. In fact, rather than changing my mind toward clemency to the accused, such a story hardened my heart against the men in that jail (and jails are typically for pre-trial confinement or for those convicted of less than six months of confinement, so often not the hardest criminal set). If this is how they behave toward 14-year-old boys, even when guards and other supervision are present, how can we possibly ever release them back into society, where we could expect them to do the same and worse? Stevenson points out that "we never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill." (p 90) In the example of the boy, perhaps we should castrate those who rape boys rather than rape them too...?
In a similar vein, Stevenson argues about people incarcerated for "non-homicide" offenses, making long terms sound like cruel and unusual punishment for people who never even killed anyone. But he includes in this category people who shot other people in the face at close range, causing grievous damage and only not killing by sheer luck (p 153). Or engaging in what Stevenson himself refers to as "a dangerous high-speed shoot out" shooting wildly out the car window and only not killing any number of people by sheer luck. (p 156) Using clinical legal terms like "non-homicide" might give some the wrong idea about the true nature of the crimes involved.
Sometimes it seems like Stevenson is making excuses; even if a person is a veteran and is suffering untreated PTSD, I don't know how much I'd excuse blowing up a 10-year-old girl, even if he hadn't specifically meant for the girl to die when the bomb went off. Who makes and sets bombs thinking no one would get hurt? Are we to leave such people commingled in peaceful, innocent society? Indeed, for as much sympathy as Stevenson evokes for his clients, he really does not address the alternative to incarcerating the dangerous to protect the innocent.
However, Stevenson makes a good case that many people (maybe all of us) are broken, and maybe the best thing to do is not to kill or permanently incarcerate all the broken people. As he provocatively asks near the end, "The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill?" (p 313, emphasis in original) Even discounting the lawyer-tricks, Stevenson brings some pretty disturbing facts and anecdotes to bear, especially the number of completely innocent people sent to prison or even death row. The fact that those who target white victims get more severe punishments than those who target black victims highlights the racism inherent in that outcome, without mixing in potentially overlapping causal factors when considering the race of the perpetrator.
That said, with all the flaws of the American system of justice, I'd rather stand accused in the United States than in Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or any number of many other countries. I would like to see the justice system improved. But I think the real problem, that Stevenson only occasionally skirts around, is why do we have so much more violence than other prosperous countries? When I see protestors out with their "End gun violence" banners, I want to cross off the word "gun," as we have too much violence of every variety in the United States. If we could change that, much of the other problems in the justice system would become far less acute, even if we would still have work to do.
Stevenson has a very human touch, essential to his portrayal of the many accused as real human beings, no matter the acts they did (or didn't) commit. I think his point would be more persuasive if he refrained from some of the rhetorical tricks he uses to exploit the feelings of less critical readers at the expense of making a more solid case. He seems to have a wealth of evidence on his side of the argument and does not need to overreach and undermine that conclusion. I do recommend it.