Brandley was working as a janitor supervisor at Conroe High School in Conroe, Texas where Fergeson was a 16-year-old student athlete visiting the school from Bellville, Texas. Four hours later, he had Wright’s story: a black man who was wrongfully convicted of being a drug kingpin in Newark and sentenced in 1991 to life in prison. Currently, one in three black boys and one in six Latino boys are projected to go to jail or prison in their lifetimes. For his part, Stevenson told "What I have to figure out is how we're going to meet the need," he said. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. He’s authored a best-selling memoir and been featured in a TED Talk on mass incarceration that went viral. "I went to the community and met dozens of African-Americans who were with this condemned man at the time the crime took place 11 miles away who absolutely knew he was innocent," he continued. And they actually did put the testifying witness on death row for a period of time until he agreed to testify against Mr. McMillian. "And they told the police, and the police didn't do anything. But until last September, on a rain-streaked afternoon at the Toronto Intl. Jordan got the idea to include the mandate in his contracts after watching Frances McDormand name-check the initiative while accepting her Oscar in 2018 for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”“We’re always coming from a place of not having power,” says Jordan. )While his restored freedom was certainly a victory, the wins all but stopped there. This is us getting to a point where we’re finally giving people what they deserve.”Those who worked on “Just Mercy” maintain that having a more diverse cast and crew fostered an important creative environment, one that was crucial to maintain as they told a story about racial injustice.“What I remember most is sitting as a group — cast, filmmakers, crew — and having these incredibly open, vulnerable conversations when the cameras weren’t rolling,” says Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson, who plays one of Stevenson’s colleagues, Eva Ansley. In the manuscript stage, Stevenson’s book found its way to Gil Netter, the producer of “The Blind Side,” who thought it had big-screen potential.“I only make movies that put good in the world,” says Netter. That’s when I realized we have to get outside the courtroom to create a different environment in which these legal decisions are being made.”So Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Alabama, began to seek the spotlight. All Marvin Anderson ever wanted to be was a firefighter. "It was pretty surreal. Foxx expertly shows his character’s dawning realization that he is powerless to mount any kind of defense in the face of such deeply ingrained prejudice.“Jamie knows that you have to live in two worlds when you live in the South,” says Stevenson. He left.' It was revealed that McMillian's truck, allegedly seen by witnesses at the scene of the crime, hadn't been converted to a "low-rider" until six months after the crime took place, despite claims that it had been seen in that modified state. He was worried that if Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that banned racial segregation in public schools, were decided today, the outcome would be markedly different.“I became persuaded that we probably couldn’t win it,” says Stevenson. “We can expect more. He’s argued and won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. If I leave, first thing people say is: 'He's guilty. Of course, the overwhelming majority of films are still centered on stories of white men, but Jordan and Foxx believe that momentum is on their side.

The “Ray” star, recognizing Jordan as an actor on the rise, reached out to him when he moved out to Los Angeles as a teenager, and they bonded over basketball games, with Foxx offering his take on the best way to navigate the entertainment business.“Jamie was one of those people who, in my head, I was always like, ‘I can’t wait to repay him,’” says Jordan.