This was gut-wrenching to read, and absolutely necessary to read. As I write this review, the nation - and world - is embroiled in huge anti-racist, anti-police brutality, Black Lives Matter protests that started due to George Floyd's murder in the state I live in, Minneapolis. Everyone is talking about how to actively fight racism, and this book came up on a lot of lists. I was already planning to read it because I'm attending NYU Law in the fall, and Bryan Stevenson teaches at NYU Law, and I've always been very interested in criminal justice reform. This book does an incredible job of explaining the injustices in the criminal justice system, how the death penalty is unequally and unfairly dispensed, and how people languish in jail for years, even when they've been proved innocent, and even when they've committed non-homicide offenses with many extenuating circumstances. It also humanized everyone involved in the cases so it wasn't just statistics. I learned so much about the way each state operates so differently in terms of how they prosecute and sentence cases, and how states can be so committed to their own image that they willingly send people to jail. It documents how change can be incremental, and not always applied retroactively, and how even when people are released from prison and cleared of their crimes, there is so much trauma that has been done to them. It's a win, but a hollow win. What a book. This is the sort of thing that we as white people MUST read. We can't look away.