St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ACADEMIC REVIEW 2025

Changes in narrative focus in the adaptation to film

facts to create a profoundly moving effect on the reader through contextualising the children’s stories with wider issues, in this way allowing the reader to empathise. It could be argued that the film also tries to give a sense of collective struggle and bias against death row inmates. For example, the montage at 00:19:00 cuts between multiple different clients of Stevenson, demonstrating how widespread the issues of unwilling defence lawyers and unfair trials are. However, I would conclude that this scene still does not delve into the depth of the backstories of the different characters to the same extent as the text which shows more powerfully how widespread the issue is. The broader narrative focus of the text, which explores the backstories of the death row inmates and the structural inequalities that they face, impacts the portrayal of the criminal justice system by emphasising its systematic failure. treatments of the death of Herbert Richardson, who was a black war veteran who fought in the Vietnam War until he was discharged due to PTSD. Herbert was convicted for capital murder in 1978 and was executed on August 18th 1989. In the memoir, there is a detailed exploration of Herbert’s backstory and how his past traumas led him to commit a crime. The genre and format of memoir provides a detailed ‘ While the film’s ending focuses on Walter McMillan and utilises techniques of cinematic closure, the memoir We also find a difference between the film and the memoir when we compare their respective

In adapting Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy from memoir to film, there is a change in narrative focus which has an impact on the portrayal of the criminal justice system. Whilst the film is constrained by limited time and so only goes into depth with a few prominent characters, Stevenson’s memoir provides detailed backstories of multiple different individuals who are death row inmates. An example of this disparity between text and film is found in the book’s detailed treatment of the cases of individuals whose stories are completely omitted from the film adaptation, such as the stories of children who are tried as adults and sentenced to a life in prison. These include Trina Garnet, Ian Manuel, and Antonio Nuñez, and Chapter 8, ‘All God’s Children’, is dedicated to relating their difficult childhoods and the abuses that they suffered. The text contextualises these children’s circumstances to explain why they committed their crimes, in Trina’s case explicitly stating how ‘Her mother’s death, the abuse, and the desperate circumstances all exacerbated Trina’s emotional and mental health problems’ (p. 149). The text also focuses on the failures of many of the assigned lawyers for these minors, using formal and legalistic language to create an authoritative narrative, for example: ‘Trina’s lawyer failed to file the appropriate motions or present evidence to support an incompetency determination for Trina... As a result, Trina was forced to stand trial for second-degree murder in an adult courthouse’ (p. 150). In sharing these children’s stories, the text moves between individual stories to the wider context, explaining the systemic inequality and racism of the legal justice system. For example, it explains that Trina ‘is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen’ (p. 151). The use of short, sharp sentences containing statistics and facts and the use of direct language, and the authoritative nature of statistics has an immediate impact making the reader understand how widespread and serious the issue is. In this respect, the text considers the widespread and structural failure of the justice system. Stevenson writes, ‘They (Trina, Ian, Antonio) weren’t exceptional. There were thousands of children like them scattered throughout prisons in the United States–children who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole or other extreme sentences.’ He intersperses narratives with

deals with a wider range of individuals and ends on a more pessimistic note ’

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