The Legacy of Lynching Reading Response In The Legacy of Lynching, Jeffrey Toobin examines the life of Bryan Stevenson, who is an African American civil rights lawyer. Throughout his career, Stevenson has worked hard to get prisoners ,who are convicted as juveniles, their life sentences reduced and their death penalties taken away. Most of these young people convicted and sentenced have been minorities, more specifically, African Americans. Throughout the article, Toobin shows and tells the multiple hardships, failures, and successes Stevenson has endured in his effort to help give these once young convicts their life back and the representation they deserve in court. One of the biggest literary devices in this article that Toobin utilizes is mood. He makes the reader pity those who have been wrongfully sentenced. One example of this is Toobin's description of a man named Joe Sullivan. Sullivan was charged with sexual assault at the age of thirteen. His trial established that he and two other older boys had robbed the home of woman when no one was there. Then later that day, the woman was sexually assaulted, by someone she could not recognize. The two …show more content…
This is most noticeable when he describes Stevenson's life. Toobin not only talks about his career as a lawyer, but he goes on describe what made him decide to become one. He does this by describing how Stevenson was raised, where he came from, and other life experienced that greatly impacted him. One such experience is when Stevenson takes an internship at the Southern Prisoner’s Defense Committee in Atlanta during his second year at Harvard. On his flight to Atlanta, the leader of the organization, Stephen Bright, happened to be on the same plane as him. “ ‘By the time the plane landed, we were very close,’ Bright recalled. ‘Bryan had found his calling.’ Toobin’s quote gives the reader a clear idea of how Stevenson became the man that he is