Phyllis’s Reviews > Just Mercy > Status Update

"It's been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up."
—Herbert Richardson

By the end of the decade, some justices had become openly critical of the review that death penalty cases received. Chief Justice William Rehnquist urged restrictions on death penalty appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions. "Let's get on with it," he famously declared at a bar association event in 1988. Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence.

"Bryan," he said at some point during our short flight, "capital punishment means 'them without the capital get the punishment.' We can't help people on death row without help from people like you."