Stevenson, a Harvard Law student, visits death-row inmate Henry for a semester program. The visit changes the direction of his life. He decides to move to Alabama to do this work full-time.

Stevenson arrives in Alabama and begins setting up the Equal Justice Initiative. He encounters pervasive racial hostility and is repeatedly stopped and harassed by police despite being a professional attorney.

Walter McMillian's case is introduced. Stevenson learns the full story of the fabricated murder conviction — the coerced witness, the withheld evidence, the death row placement before trial.

Stevenson represents Herbert Richardson, a traumatized Vietnam veteran with PTSD and mental illness, through his execution. The chapter is the book's most devastating account of the death penalty's human cost.

Stevenson takes the case of Charlie, a fourteen-year-old tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison. He explores the broader crisis of children being sentenced to die in adult prisons.

Stevenson faces setbacks in Walter McMillian's case as the Alabama courts resist reopening the conviction. He also confronts the emotional toll of the work on himself and his EJI colleagues.

Stevenson fights for clients with severe mental illness and intellectual disabilities who were condemned despite constitutional protections. He traces the systemic failures that allow the mentally ill to be executed.

Stevenson represents Ian Manuel, a thirteen-year-old sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide offense. Ian's story — decades in solitary, an unexpected friendship with his victim — becomes the book's most complex meditation on mercy.