Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Darnell said he told Walter’s former lawyers what he told me and they had raised it in the motion for a new trial, but no one took it seriously. In capital cases, a motion for a new trial is routinely filed but rarely granted. But if the defendant alleges new evidence that could lead to a different outcome in the case—or that undermines the reliability of the trial—there is typically a hearing. After speaking with Darnell, I thought about refiling his assertions before the case went up on appeal and maybe, just maybe, we could persuade local officials to retreat from the case against Walter. I made a motion to reconsider the denial of a new trial for Mr. McMillian. I immediately got an affidavit from Darnell stating that Hooks’s testimony was a lie. I took the risk of talking to a few local lawyers about whether the new prosecutor might acknowledge that the conviction was unreliable and support a new trial if there was compelling new evidence. Several people had suggested that Tom Chapman, the new Monroe County district attorney and a former criminal defense attorney, would be fairer and more sympathetic to someone wrongly convicted than lifelong prosecutor Ted Pearson. After Pearson’s long tenure as D.A., Chapman’s election represented something of a new era. He was in his forties and had talked about modernizing law enforcement in the region. Some said that he was ambitious and might want to run for statewide office someday. I also discovered that he had represented Karen Kelly in a prior proceeding, which told me that he was already familiar with the case. I was hopeful. I was still sorting out how to proceed when Darnell called me at my office. “Mr. Stevenson, you have to help. They arrested me this morning and took me to the jail. I just got out on bond.” “What?” “I asked them what I had done. They told me I was being charged with perjury.” He sounded terrified. “Perjury? Based on what you told Mr. McMillian’s lawyers a year ago? Have they come to interview you or talk to you since we got your statement? You were supposed to let me know if you heard from them.” “No, sir. I haven’t heard from any of them. They just came and arrested me and told me I had been indicted for perjury.” I hung up with Darnell, shocked and furious. It was unheard of to indict someone for perjury without any investigation or compelling evidence to establish that a false statement had been made.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  At some point we asked him some direct questions about where he was on the day of the murder, which must have alarmed him because we heard from him less often after that. Before I could tell any of this to the ABI investigators, Taylor said, “We think you may have interviewed our suspect and may have collected a good bit of information from this guy. We were hoping you might allow us to have access to that information and those interviews.” He named our suspect. I told them we would give them access to the information we had collected. None of it was protected by attorney-client privilege; we had never represented this man or obtained anything confidentially. I told Taylor and Cole to give us a few days to organize the information, and then we would turn it over. “We want to get Walter out of prison as soon as possible,” I insisted. “Well, I think the attorney general and the lawyers would like to maintain the status quo for a few more months, until we can make an arrest of the actual killer.” “Right, but you do understand that the status quo is a problem for us? Walter has been on death row for nearly six years for a crime he didn’t commit.” Taylor and Cole looked at each other uncomfortably. Taylor responded, “We’re not lawyers so I can’t really understand where they’re coming from. If I was in prison for something I didn’t do and you were my lawyer, I hope to hell you’d get me out as soon as you could.” When they left, Bernard and I were very excited, but we remained troubled by this plan to “maintain the status quo.” I decided I would call the attorney general’s office and see if they would concede legal error in the pending appeal, which would ensure relief at the appellate court and perhaps expedite Walter’s release. Another lawyer from the attorney general’s office named Ken Nunnelly had taken over the appeal. I had dealt with Nunnelly in several other death penalty cases. I told him that I’d met with the ABI investigators and that I understood there were some case developments that favored Mr. McMillian. It became clear that the state lawyers had been discussing this case quite a bit. “Bryan, it’s all going to work out, but you’ll need to wait a few more months. He’s been on the row for years, so a few more months are not going to make that much of a difference.” “Ken, every day makes a difference when you’re locked down on death row, and you’ve been wrongly convicted.” I tried to get a commitment but he offered nothing.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I stayed on my feet. “The State doesn’t bear the burden of presenting a case in these proceedings, Your Honor; we do. This isn’t a criminal trial but a postconviction evidentiary hearing.” “Judge, they’re the ones that are trying to retry this case and we need our people inside,” Valeska countered. The judge jumped in with, “Well, it does sound like you’re trying to retry the case, Mr. Stevenson, so I’m going to allow the State to keep the crime investigators in the courtroom.” It was not a good start. I decided to proceed with an opening statement before calling Myers as our first witness. I wanted the judge to understand that we weren’t simply defending Mr. McMillian from a different angle than his original lawyers. I wanted him to know that we had dramatic new evidence of innocence that exonerated Walter and that justice demanded his immediate release. We wouldn’t succeed if the judge didn’t know how to hear the evidence. “Your Honor, the State’s case against Walter McMillian turned entirely on the testimony of Ralph Myers, who had several prior felony convictions and another capital murder case pending against him in Escambia County at the time of Mr. McMillian’s trial. At trial, Mr. McMillian asserted that he is innocent and that he did not know Mr. Myers at the time of this crime. He has maintained his innocence throughout these proceedings.” The judge had been fidgeting and had seemed distracted when I started, so I paused. Even if he didn’t agree I wanted him to hear what I was saying. I stopped talking until I was sure that he was paying close attention. Finally he made eye contact with me, so I continued. “There is no question that Walter McMillian was convicted of capital murder based on the testimony of Ralph Myers. There was no other evidence to establish Mr. McMillian’s guilt for capital murder at trial other than Myers’s testimony. The State had no physical evidence linking Mr. McMillian to this crime, the State had no motive, the State had no witnesses to the crime, the State had only the testimony of Ralph Myers. “At trial, Myers testified that he was unknowingly and unwillingly made part of a capital murder and robbery on November 1, 1986, when Walter McMillian saw him at a car wash and asked him to drive McMillian’s truck because his ‘arm hurt.’ Myers stated that he drove Mr. McMillian to Jackson Cleaners, subsequently went into the cleaners, and saw McMillian with a gun, placing money in a brown bag. Another man, who was white, was also present in the cleaners. Myers testified this man had black-gray hair and allegedly talked to McMillian. Myers asserted that he was shoved and threatened by Mr.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If prostitution was an obstacle to Christianization, marriage was an opportunity for reformist ambitions. Chrysostom’s sermons reveal an ecclesiastical ambition to control the rituals of marriage as a means of gaining control over the meaning of marriage. It is telling that, across late antiquity, the ancient deductio in domum, a festive march from the bride’s house to the groom’s, remained the ordinary marriage ritual. The endurance of joyous, erotically charged wedding ceremonies testifies to the survival, beneath the spread of religious solemnity, of a sexual sensibility that is probably closer to Achilles Tatius than anything contrived by a Christian bishop. Nothing nettled Chrysostom so much as the “diabolical pomp,” which, he argued in vain, “dishonored” the marriage. The “whorish songs,” the “shameful speeches,” the “unrestrained laughter” were an immovable part of the rite for young men and women entering into the mysteries of conjugal love. Again, he invoked a fear of demons to accomplish through superstition what moral suasion could not. The “songs of Venus,” the hired entertainers—no more than “whores and she-men”—were an open invitation to demonic possession. What irked Chrysostom was that the same couple who indulged in the frankly erotic celebrations of an ancient wedding now expected the Christian priest to drop in, on the next day, to bless the union! But the preacher knew where he stood; the inhabitants of an ancient Mediterranean town were in no mood to surrender such a precious moment of release. “I know that I will seem severe and tiresome, urging you to uproot such an ancient custom … but where sin dares to surface, make no mention to me of ‘custom.’ ”50

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Israel has always been balky, Stephen observes, rejecting Moses after God sent him to rescue them from Egypt (Acts 7.35), turning their hearts back to Egypt rather than obeying him (7.39). “Instead, they pushed him aside, . . . saying to Aaron, ‘Make gods for us who will lead the way for us.’ . . . And they made a calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and reveled in the works of their hand” (7.39–41). God turned away from them, Stephen continues, and “handed them over to worship the host of heaven” (stars, planets, and the deities associated with them, 7.42); that is, Luke writes, leaping from the period in the wilderness to the period of the monarchy and of the First Temple, God handed Israel over to the worship of foreign gods: As it is written in the book of the prophets, “Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices, forty years in the wilderness, 0 house of Israel? No! You took along the tent of Moloch, and the star of your god Rephan, the images that you made to worship; so I will remove you beyond Babylon.” (Acts 7.42–43; cf. Amos 5.25–27) Stephen then criticizes the building of the temple itself, which is (or had been, by the time that Luke composes his story, c. 100) the place of Israel’s sacrifices. “The Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands,” Stephen continues, quoting Isaiah 66.1–2: “Made by hand” and like phrases, which I have italicized above, code for the idols of foreign gods; but in Stephen’s accusation, through Luke’s tight juxtaposing, the phrase also codes for the temple. When has Israel not worshiped idols and false gods? When have they not dishonored God? This fundamental sin, the blatant violation of the very first commandment, was the whole reason why God had sent his prophets to Israel. But Israel used this summons to repentance as an opportunity to sin even more: You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the holy spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One [Jesus], and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You received the law . . . and yet you have not kept it. (Acts 7.51–53) From the nation’s very beginnings right up to the present day, says Stephen/Luke, Israel has never not been attracted to idols. The prophets came repeatedly to turn them from false worship, and repeatedly Israel rejected them, even killed them. But Luke here has cinched this accusation to another, more terrible one: it is the Jews who killed Jesus.27

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The sisters voiced suspicions about their brother and about local law enforcement but complained that the prosecutor had disrespected and ignored them. (Vic Pittman was never formally charged for the murder.) They said they were turned away even by the state’s victims’ rights group. “They treated us like we were low-class white trash. They could not have cared less about us.” Mozelle looked furious as she spoke. “I thought they treated victims better. I thought we had some say.” — Although crime victims had long complained about their treatment in the criminal justice system, by the 1980s a new movement had emerged that resulted in much more responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that not all crime victims received the same treatment. Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the “Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a representative of the civic authorities. In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional. The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. The Court prohibited jurors from hearing “victim impact” statements because they were too inflammatory and introduced arbitrariness into the capital sentencing process. Many critics argued that such evidence would ultimately disempower poor victims, victims who were racial minorities, and family members who didn’t have the resources to advocate for their deceased loved ones. The Court agreed, striking down this kind of evidence in Booth v. Maryland. The Court’s decision was widely criticized by prosecutors and some politicians, and it seemed to energize the victims’ rights movement.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  The friar answered in the affirmative, and Hatuey retorted that he did not want to go to heaven, where he would see such cruel people. Hatuey, along with many Amerindians, rejected the white Jesus of the dominant culture. In 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock and a few days after the first session of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first slave ship docked in Virginia. It was named the Jesus. Prior to being led away from their homeland forever, Africans were forced to pass under a religious cleric who usually sat on an ivory chair baptizing these chained “heathens” in the name of Jesus. Throughout the Middle Passage, these slaves would see pious captains holding prayer services twice a day and penning famous hymns about the sweet name of Jesus or God's amazing grace. These Africans, being led to a life of servitude, like so many of their descendants, saw no reason to turn to the white Jesus of the dominant culture. Like Amerindians and Africans, the people of the world have been told that there is only one true representation of Jesus and shown illustrations or images drawn by members of the dominant culture, such as columnist Kathleen Parker. This Jesus becomes a collective representation of society, a symbolic expression that provides a sense of unity and functions to solidify society. The Jesus of the dominant culture serves as a means by which those who are privileged transmit their culture, morality, and values from one generation to the next. It provides a divine symbolic mandate for models of social behavior designed to bless those with power who benefit from the status quo. Is it any wonder that the Kathleen Parkers of society find a nonwhite Jesus threatening? The salvific gospel message of liberation incarnated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ should be the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted. Unfortunately, through the white Jesus of the dominant culture, the opposite has occurred. The name of Jesus has been used historically to justify oppression and injustice. Here, then, is the basic question that people on the margins must ask when searching for the Christ who will serve as the touchstone for all biblical interpretations: does this image of Jesus Christ provide life and provide it abundantly? Rather than being a Jesus that provides abundant life, the white Jesus has been used to bring abundant death to those on the margins of society, and for this reason the white Jesus is rejected by some people on the margins because it has historically served as the Antichrist of Christianity. The white Christ promised to the Amerindian about to be suffocated and the white Jesus whose name was blazoned upon the slave ship can symbolize for the people on the margins Satan, hiding in the image of an angel of light.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Our recent successes had sapped our discipline: at the advance posts I found something of the gross heedlessness evinced in the feasting at Rome. Certain tribunes gave proof of foolish overconfidence in the face of danger: perilously isolated in a region where the only part we knew well was our former frontier, they were depending for continued victories upon our armament, which I beheld daily diminishing from loss and from wear, and upon reinforcements which I had no hope to see, knowing that all our resources would thereafter be concentrated upon Asia. Another danger began to threaten: four years of official requisitioning had ruined the villages to our rear; from the time of the first Dacian campaigns, for each herd of oxen or flock of sheep so ostentatiously captured from the enemy I had seen innumerable droves of cattle seized from the inhabitants. If that state of things continued, the moment was approaching when our peasant populations, tired of supporting our burdensome military machine, would end by preferring the barbarians. Pillage by our soldiery presented a less important problem, perhaps, but one which was far more conspicuous. My popularity was such that I could risk imposition of the most rigorous restrictions upon the troops; I made current an austerity which I practiced myself, inventing the cult of the Imperial Discipline, which later I succeeded in extending throughout the army. The rash and the ambitious, who were complicating my task, were sent back to Rome; in their stead I summoned technicians, of whom we had too few. It was essential to repair the defensive works which inflated pride over our recent victories had left singularly neglected; I abandoned entirely whatever would have been too costly to maintain. Civil administrators, solidly installed in the disorder which follows every war, were rising by degrees to the level of semi-independent chieftains, capable of all kinds of extortion from our subjects and of every possible treachery toward us. On that score, as well, I could see in the more or less immediate future the beginning of revolts and divisions to come. I do not believe that we can avoid these disasters, any more than we can escape death, but it depends upon us to postpone them for a few centuries. I got rid of incompetent officials; I had the worst executed. I was discovering myself to be inexorable. A humid summer gave way to a misty autumn, and then to a cold winter. I had need of my knowledge of medicine, and needed it first of all to treat myself. That life on the frontiers brought me little by little down to the level of the Sarmatian tribesmen: the philosopher's beard changed to that of the barbarian chieftain.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to adult prosecution and punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant that most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. Juvenile justice systems vary across the United States, but most states would have kept Trina, Ian, or Antonio in juvenile custody until they turned eighteen or twenty-one. At most, they might have stayed in custody until age twenty-five or older, if their institutional history or juvenile detention record suggested that they were still a threat to public safety. In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually high-profile—or committed by a black child against a white person in the South. For instance, in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, two of the defendants, Roy Wright and Eugene Williams, were just thirteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to death in Alabama. In another signature case of juvenile prosecution, George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black boy, was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16, 1944. Three months earlier, two young white girls who lived nearby in Alcolu, a small mill town where the races were separated by railroad tracks, had gone out to pick flowers and never returned home. Scores of people across the community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day. The girls had approached them while they were playing outside and asked where they could find flowers. The next day, the dead bodies of the girls were found in a shallow ditch. George was immediately arrested for the murders because he had admitted seeing the girls before they disappeared and was the last person to see them alive. He was subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney present. The understandable anger about the death of the girls exploded when word circulated that a black boy had been arrested for the murders. The sheriff claimed that George had confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was summarily fired from his job; his family was told to leave town or else they would be lynched. Out of fear for their lives, George’s family fled town late that night, leaving George behind in jail with no family support. Within hours of announcing the alleged confession, a lynch mob formed at the jailhouse in Alcolu, but the fourteen-year-old had already been moved to a jail in Charleston.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It was difficult to ignore his clearly hostile attitude, but I did my best. “Okay, do you need me to take my shoes off?” The hardcore officers would sometimes make me remove my shoes before going inside. “You’re going to go into that bathroom and take everything off if you expect to get into my prison.” I was shocked, but spoke as nicely as I could. “Oh, no, sir. I think you might be confused. I’m an attorney. Lawyers don’t have to get strip-searched to come in for legal visits.” Instead of calming him, this seemed to make him angrier. “Look, I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re not coming into my prison without complying with our security protocols. Now, you can get into that bathroom and strip, or you can go back to wherever you came from.” I’d had some difficult encounters with officers getting into prisons from time to time, mostly in small county jails or places where I’d never been before, but this was highly unusual. “I’ve been to this prison many times, and I’ve never been required to submit to a strip search. I don’t think this is the procedure,” I said more firmly. “Well, I don’t know and don’t care what other people do, but this is the protocol I use.” I thought about trying to find an assistant warden but realized that that might be difficult, and anyway, an assistant warden would be unlikely to tell an officer he was wrong in front of me. I had driven two hours for this visit and had a very tough schedule over the next three weeks; I wouldn’t be able to get back to the prison any time soon if I didn’t get in now. I went inside the bathroom and removed my clothes. The officer came in and gave me an unnecessarily aggressive search before mumbling that I was clear. I put my suit back on and walked out. “I’d like to get inside the visitation room now.” I tried to reclaim some dignity by speaking more forcefully. “Well, you have to go back and sign the book.” He said it coolly, but he was clearly trying to provoke me. There was a visitation log that the prison used for family visits, but it was not used for legal visits. I’d already signed the attorney book. It would make no sense to sign a second book. “Lawyers don’t have to sign that book—” “If you want to come in my prison, you’ll sign the book.” He seemed to be smirking now. I tried hard to keep my composure. I turned around and went over to the book and signed my name. I walked back to the visitation room and waited.

• From Untrue (2018)

  These coercive tactics—subtly undermining stock photos, explicitly racist epithets, overt threats—work. Many women told me they avoid using hashtags like #feminism on Twitter during periods when misogynist trolls are out in full force—basically always. Until Wonder Woman and Hidden Figures, studios had little interest in making movies with female protagonists for female audiences—and were more reluctant still to bankroll films with black female protagonists. Indeed, a hacked email from Marvel’s CEO to a Sony exec in 2014 argued that investing in female viewers would be a mistake, cementing the impression that Hollywood likes to bet on teenaged boys and men. Hillary Clinton was defeated by a wave of conviction that we had to “Trump that bitch, crooked Hillary,” or the entire world would fall apart; white women fell in line. Leslie Jones got back to the business of comedy and was tapped as an Olympic commentator after being subjected to viciously racist, misogynist trolling for having the audacity to defend the right of women to an imaginary job previously reserved for men—ghostbusting—but she did take a brief Twitter break, citing the toll taken on her by haters. Jenkins can deconstruct and understand the rageful words directed at her and others who step outside the narrow lane women are supposed to stay in, whether by refusing sexual exclusivity or by not shutting up about male coercion or by running for president. But the words sting, every single time. “I have wildly optimistic days and terribly dark pessimistic days,” she summarizes when I ask her how she is taking the controversy around her book. “Saying women are people, not property, is deeply threatening, even to people who say they believe in equality,” she observed, mentioning the deep and unexamined current of misogyny among not just Trump supporters but also some Bernie Sanders fans. “I’m in a position to represent the non-weirdness of poly in that I present as quite a boring human being,” she continues. “And I threaten the slutty stereotype because I write as a philosopher and have institutional creds and prestige, plus look how I dress for my photos! Dowdy!” She pauses for a moment and then summarizes: “The whole combination makes me at once threatening and hard to dismiss. But the status quo reaches so far down. So much is built on top of it. It’s the foundation.” On her best days, Jenkins sees the backlash against her lifestyle, against her book, against women who aren’t monogamous and aren’t apologizing about it, and against women who feel entitled to sexual self-determination and autonomy more generally as a kind of extinction burst event. “Maybe the backlash is this spectacular, last-gasp thing we have to get through. And it’s actually a sign that the prejudices are dying this dramatic death because they run so deep,” she posits.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Walter at times expressed frustration that people didn’t believe him when he told them he had received nothing. We pressed ahead in our efforts to get compensation for him through a lawsuit, but there were obstacles. Our civil suit ran up against laws that give police, prosecutors, and judges special immunity from civil liability in criminal justice matters. While Chapman and the state officers connected with the case now readily acknowledged Walter’s innocence, they were unwilling to accept any responsibility for his wrongful prosecution and death sentence. Sheriff Tate, who seemed most active in Walter’s wrongful pretrial placement on death row and whose racist threats and intimidation tactics seemed the most actionable in a civil suit, reportedly accepted Walter’s innocence upon his release but then started telling people that he still believed Walter was guilty. Rob McDuff, an old friend of mine from Jackson, Mississippi, agreed to join our team for the civil litigation. Rob is a white native Mississippian whose Southern charm and manner enhanced his outstanding litigation skills in Alabama courts. He had recently asked me to help him with an Alabama civil rights case involving law enforcement misconduct. That case involved a police raid on a nightclub in Chambers County during which black residents had been illegally detained, mistreated, and abused by local authorities who refused to accept any responsibility for their misconduct. We ended up taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we ultimately won a favorable ruling. Walter’s civil case would also go to the U.S. Supreme Court. We sued almost a dozen state and local officials and agencies. As expected, the defendants all claimed immunity for the conduct that had resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction. The immunity from civil liability given to prosecutors and judges is even greater than the protections provided to law enforcement officers. So even though it was clear that Ted Pearson, the prosecutor who had tried the case against Walter, had illegally withheld evidence that directly resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction, we would likely not succeed in a civil action against him. As he was the person most in charge of Walter’s wrongful prosecution and conviction, it was hard to reconcile his immunity with his culpability in the whole affair, but there was little we could do. State and federal courts have persistently insulated prosecutors from accountability for egregious misconduct that results in innocent people being sent to death row.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  This was the moment I had come three thousand miles for, this was it, all the pain and the rage, all the trials and the death of the war and what had been done to me and a generation of Americans by all the men who had lied to us and tricked us, by the man who stood before us in the convention hall that night, while men who had fought for their country were being gassed and beaten in the street outside the hall. I thought of Bobby who sat next to me and the months we had spent in the hospital in the Bronx. It was all hitting me at once, all those years, all that destruction, all that sorrow. President Nixon began to speak and all three of us took a deep breath and shouted at the top of our lungs, “Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war,” as loud and as hard as we could, looking directly at Nixon. The security agents immediately threw up their arms, trying to hide us from the cameras and the president. “Stop the bombing, stop the bombing,” I screamed. For an instant Cronkite looked down, then turned his head away. They’re not going to show it, I thought. They’re going to try and hide us like they did in the hospitals. Hundreds of people around us began to clap and shout “Four more years,” trying to drown out our protest. They all seemed very angry and shouted at us to stop. We continued shouting, interrupting Nixon again and again until Secret Service agents grabbed our chairs from behind and began pulling us backward as fast as they could out of the convention hall. “Take it easy,” Bobby said to me. “Don’t fight back.” I wanted to take a swing and fight right there in the middle of the convention hall in front of the president and the whole country. “So this is how they treat their wounded veterans!” I screamed. A short guy with a big Four More Years button ran up to me and spat in my face. “Traitor!” he screamed, as he was yanked back by police. Pandemonium was breaking out all around us and the Secret Service men kept pulling us out backward. “I served two tours of duty in Vietnam!” I screamed to one newsman. “I gave three-quarters of my body for America. And what do I get? Spit in the face!” I kept screaming until we hit the side entrance where the agents pushed us outside and shut the doors, locking them with chains and padlocks so reporters wouldn’t be able to follow us out for interviews. All three of us sat holding on to each other shaking. We had done it. It had been the biggest moment of our lives, we had shouted down the president of the United States and disrupted his acceptance speech. What more was there left to do but go home?

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “I wanted to get all the way to the front, but this place is great.” We lined ourselves up together, wheelchair to wheelchair, facing the platform where Nixon would speak. They had brought in a couple of Stop the War signs, and I grabbed one and held it above my head. There was an announcement at the podium and then a tremendous roar. It was the vice president of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew. The delegates stood chanting and shaking their clasped hands over their heads, stamping their feet up and down until it seemed as though the whole convention hall was going to explode. “Four more years,” the crowd shouted. “Four more years, four more years.” Agnew stood rigid at attention, accepting the tumultuous applause. Finally he raised both of his palms, signaling them all to stop so he could give his speech. Every time he spoke a few words, he was interrupted by the wild crowd, wild and enthusiastic. “Agnew in ’seventy-six!” a fat woman yelled next to me. “Agnew in ’seventy-six!” I pulled myself up onto the siderail of my wheelchair and sat holding my sign as high as I could. I wanted everyone in the hall to be able to see it. A man came up suddenly from my blind side. Before I knew what hit me he had grabbed my sign and torn it into shreds in front of me. “You lousy commie sonofabitch!” he shouted. Now there was only one sign left and we decided to hold on to it until it was Nixon’s turn to speak. A few seconds before he was introduced, security agents began to move in all around us. We must have been an ugly sight to the National Republican Party as we sat there in perfect view of all the national networks that were perched above us. Suddenly a roar went up in the convention hall, louder than anything I had ever heard in my life. It started off as a rumble, then gained in intensity until it sounded like a tremendous thunderbolt. “Four more years, four more years,” the crowd roared over and over again. The fat woman next to me was jumping up and down and dancing in the aisle. It was the greatest ovation the president of the United States had ever received and he loved it. I held the sides of my wheelchair to keep my hands from shaking. After what seemed forever, the roar finally began to die down.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The ecclesiastical campaign against same-sex love was vicious but highly sporadic. By contrast, the struggle against fornication, porneia, was a full-fledged war, which saw the church muster its forces in deliberate array against an ancient style of sexual life. The preaching was endless, the penitential enforcement real. But the sex industry was too entrenched for the Christian state even to compass its repression. Instead, the Christian emperors focused on an aspect of the sex trade whose moral and material significance should not be underestimated: they banned forced prostitution. The brutal exposure of vulnerable women rested on a public indifference so vast that it lay invisibly at the very foundations of the ancient sexual order. As Christianity progressively absorbed society, and could ever less comfortably present itself as a dissent movement apart from the world, it was forced to reckon with the silences in its own sexual program. Because prostitution was at the center of an ancient sexual culture, an order of relationships between state and society built on the concept of shame, the progressive realization of its injustice is a privileged index of Christianization. The aggressive campaign of Justinian against compulsion in the flesh industry marks the end of a distinctly ancient sexual order, one whose distant origins lie at the very beginnings of the archaic Mediterranean city-state and finally crumble in the midst of his rule.16 Chapter 4 follows the Christian revolution in sexual morality through the medium of imaginative literature. The fictional word is an essential complement to the injunctions of the moralists and the dictates of law. Literature is capable of expressing, in a way more intimate than mere commands, the shape of sexual morality, when actually projected onto the furrowed plane of human life. Pagans, Christians, and Jews alike used stories as vehicles to express their deepest beliefs about the relationships between the sexual body, the mechanics of society, and the nature of the cosmos. The Christian transformation of sex can be retraced in the history of literature, which mirrors quite sensitively the passage from a public sexual ideology organized around the imperatives of social reproduction to a mentality founded in ecclesiastical norms. In short, the history of literature recapitulates the passage from shame to sin.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Police and prosecutors had found out that Darnell was talking to us and they decided to punish him for it. A few days later, I called the new D.A. to set up a meeting. On my way to his office, I decided to give him a chance to explain what was going on, instead of angrily complaining about the insanity of indicting someone for perjury because he had contradicted a State’s witness. I decided to wait until after my meeting before filing my stack of motions. This was my first meeting with anyone associated with Walter’s prosecution, and I didn’t want to begin with an angry accusation. I had allowed myself to believe that the people who had prosecuted Walter were just misguided, possibly incompetent. I knew some of them were bigoted and abusive, but I guess I held out the hope that they could be reoriented. Indicting Darnell was a worrisome signal that they were willing to threaten and intimidate people. The Monroe County courthouse is situated in the heart of downtown Monroeville. I drove into town, parked, and entered the courthouse looking for the district attorney’s office. On my only other trip to the courthouse a month earlier, I had gone to the clerk’s office to pick up files and the staff had asked me where I was from. When I said Montgomery, they launched into a lecture about Monroeville’s prominence as a result of Harper Lee and her famous novel. I remember how the clerk had chatted me up. “Have you read the book? It’s a wonderful story. This is a famous place. They made the old courthouse a museum, and when they made the movie Gregory Peck came here. You should go over there and stand where Mr. Peck stood—I mean, where Atticus Finch stood.” She giggled with excitement, although I imagine she said the same thing to every out-of-town attorney who wandered in. She continued talking enthusiastically about the story until I promised to visit the museum as soon as I could. I refrained from explaining that I was too busy working on the case of an innocent black man the community was trying to execute after a racially biased prosecution. During this trip I was in a different frame of mind. The last thing I was interested in was a fictional story about justice. I walked through the courthouse until I found the district attorney’s office. I announced myself to the secretary, who eyed me suspiciously before directing me into Chapman’s office. He walked over to shake my hand. Chapman started off by saying, “Mr. Stevenson, lots of people want to meet you.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It sticks out like a knife and every few minutes my leg jumps in violent spasms, the bone cutting and stabbing back and forth. The big clumsy cast I have been encased in isn’t doing any good. It is not going to heal. Again and again I wonder why it has happened, why I am back in the same place I fought so hard to leave before. The doctor never seems to be around. When he does show up it is only for a minute to see if I am still alive. He walks in and out, mumbles a few words. Once he calls me by the wrong name. It frightens me. It is like being in a prison. But it is not a prison, it is a hospital. The tall skinny man who brings my breakfast calls me Seventeen. “Seventeen!” he screams, waking me out of a doped sleep. “Seventeen! It’s time to eat.” Up and down the halls the nurses move like programmed robots, pushing their metal carts, giving shots, handing out medication. There is one nurse who always tells me I am crazy. She gives me extra doses of a drug to make me drowsy. It is so easy to lose it all here. The whole place functions so smoothly, but somewhere along the way I am losing, and all the rest of the people whom I can’t see in the rooms around me are losing too. Even if I make it out of this place, I think, even if I heal the leg, I will lose. No one ever leaves this place without losing something. Early one morning the doctor comes into my room and tells me he’s been thinking it might be a good idea to cut my leg off. He tells me that to cut the leg off would be a very simple thing. He makes it sound so easy, like there would be nothing to it. It’s they who are all crazy in here, I think. They are all moving so quickly, all of them in such a fantastic hurry. This place is more like a factory to break people than to mend them and put them back together again. I don’t want them to cut my leg off. It is numb and dead but it still means something to me. It is still mine. It is a part of me and I am not going to give it away that easily. Why isn’t anyone helping me? I think over and over again. Why am I being forgotten in this place? Something is happening to me in Room 17. I lie and stare at the walls of the small green box they have put me in. The walls are almost as dirty as the floor and I cannot even see out of the window. I feel myself changing, the anger is building up in me. It has become a force I cannot control. I push the call button again and again.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Michael and I traveled to rural Escambia County and were greeted by the twins. They invited us in, sat us at the kitchen table, and wasted no time. “Did your client kill our baby?” Mozelle asked bluntly. “No, ma’am, I sincerely believe he did not.” “Do you know who did?” I sighed. “Well, not completely. We’ve spoken to Ralph Myers and believe that he and Karen Kelly were involved, but Myers insists that there were others involved as well.” Mozelle looked at Onzelle and leaned back. “We know there’s more involved,” said Onzelle. The sisters voiced suspicions about their brother and about local law enforcement but complained that the prosecutor had disrespected and ignored them. (Vic Pittman was never formally charged for the murder.) They said they were turned away even by the state’s victims’ rights group. “They treated us like we were low-class white trash. They could not have cared less about us.” Mozelle looked furious as she spoke. “I thought they treated victims better. I thought we had some say.” — Although crime victims had long complained about their treatment in the criminal justice system, by the 1980s a new movement had emerged that resulted in much more responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that not all crime victims received the same treatment. Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the “Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a representative of the civic authorities.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Straight men in our culture have relatively easy access to massages with happy endings, strip clubs, prostitutes, and pornography without much shame if they’re seeking these services from women (because, after all, “Men like to look” and “It’s what guys do”). Skirt Club is the rare tensional outlet for female “infidelity” that maybe isn’t, a pretty extraordinary niche where women can show up, have sex, and then matter-of-factly go home to their heterosexual marriages or partnerships. Granted, they are having sex with women, which men might find less threatening and more titillating and “safe” than their female partners having sex with other men. But it still struck me as meaningful that LeJeune was in some sense evening the score thus. And that there was an outcry about her daring to do so. While her project was at once embraced by women who wanted a piece of the action—Skirt Club now has seven thousand members worldwide, she told me—it has also been derided from all sides. The article I wrote about Skirt Club L.A. garnered dozens of comments, many of them from apparently enraged men who demeaned and devalued the parties in terms that showed their hand: many wrote that they were sure the pictures were doctored and that the women were unattractive, for example. “You can’t exclude me because I wouldn’t want to be there anyway,” they assert. And any woman who would want to do such a thing must, perforce, be undesirable. Meanwhile, other more progressively minded critics have called Skirt Club exclusionary, looks-ist, expensive, a habitus for newbie femmes. It is frequently dismissed as soft-core, male-fantasy-inflected “Victoria’s Secret lesbianism,” a somehow suspect compromise formation for women who are merely toying with same-sex sex rather than really committing to it (a Rolling Stone article called it “a sex party where straight women are gay for a night” as if such a practice is suspect and inauthentic). There is, perhaps, plenty to criticize. But the assertion that it is somehow watered-down lesbianism-lite or “fake” doesn’t mesh with or describe the complexity of what I witnessed—including assumed straight women going at it (with other women) like I’d never seen before within a space designed for them to do so in comfort and privacy from the rest of the world. Their pleasure and orgasms seemed very real.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Thus Paul, midcentury. How had he managed to sustain his conviction of the nearness of the kingdom for almost two decades? Through the constant reinforcement of his eschatological interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection due to the subsequent success of the new movement among pagans. These people—whom Paul refers to quite casually and to their faces as “gentile sinners” (Gal 2.15)—when still worshiping their own gods had been “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness and malice. . . . Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents. Foolish. Faithless. Heartless. Ruthless” (Rm 1.29–32). It would take a miracle for such people to turn away from their idols—and that is precisely what Paul thought he was witnessing. Paul’s insistence that Christ-following gentiles not be circumcised, in other words, has nothing to do with his personal practice of Jewish ancestral custom, and nothing to do with any supposed antagonism between the ekklēsia and the synagogue. Instead, it has everything to do with his vision of the risen Christ, with his call to be an apostle, and with his sense of his own mission. The very existence of such gentiles who have turned from their idols and who have made an exclusive commitment to the god of Israel is a profound and ongoing validation of Paul’s work. They confirm him in his conviction that he does, after all, know what time it is on God’s clock. They are the reason why he can assert, decades after joining the movement, that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, and the day is at hand” (Rm 13.11–12). If he could just bring in their full number, the final events could unwind (Rm 11.25–36). Paul’s furious impatience with the circumcisers in Galatia measures the importance of such gentiles to his entire worldview and to his own sense of self. In ceasing to worship their own gods; in calling the god of Israel “Abba, Father” and, through the Spirit, becoming God’s adopted children (Rm 8.15); and in ceasing to be slaves of sin, Paul’s anomalous, exceptional pagans continuously enacted and reenacted this important end-time event, the turning of the nations to Israel’s god.