We are all broken by something

“We are all broken by something” is Bryan Stevenson’s recognition that human vulnerability is shared, even when the injuries people endure and the harms they cause are not equivalent. Reached while Jimmy Dill was being executed, the expression changes brokenness from a mark that separates the condemned from everyone else into a basis for compassion, accountability, and the search for healing.

The recognition at the execution

After more than twenty-five years of work, Stevenson found himself asking why he continued: his office was crowded with files, his staff had grown to nearly forty people, and he could imagine leaving. The immediate setting for his reflection was Jimmy Dill’s execution at Holman Prison. Stevenson understood that his work was not simply a duty he had to perform or a necessity imposed on him. Its motive, as he put it, was personal: “I do what I do because I’m broken, too.”

The insight did not equate Stevenson’s experience with Dill’s. Stevenson wanted mercy for Dill and justice for him, but he recognized that he could not treat Dill’s struggle as wholly separate from his own. People have been hurt and have hurt others; those experiences connect them, while remaining different in kind and degree. Shared brokenness is therefore not a claim that every person has suffered equally or bears the same responsibility. It is a refusal to make another person’s suffering wholly alien.

The execution sharpened that distinction. Stevenson pictured guards strapping Dill to the gurney and people who would welcome his death as a victory. They, too, were broken, he reasoned, whether or not they would acknowledge it. The contrast is central to the expression: a common human condition can be admitted and answered with compassion, or denied and turned into a reason to punish those whose vulnerability is most visible.

What brokenness means

Stevenson develops the idea through two different kinds of harm. People may be fractured by choices they make, or shattered by events they would never have chosen. The expression holds both possibilities together without confusing them. It recognizes the reality of harmful acts and the reality of suffering inflicted on a person; neither makes that person’s entire identity reducible to a single injury, failure, or crime.

The formulation “We are bodies of broken bones,” which Paul Farmer quoted from Thomas Merton, gives this understanding a physical image. Brokenness is not presented as an exceptional condition belonging only to clients or people in crisis; it is part of being human. Stevenson connects that shared vulnerability to a common search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Imperfection can sustain compassion precisely because it makes human need recognizable across differences.

This recognition also requires a limit: commonality does not make everyone’s brokenness equivalent. Stevenson distinguishes the ways he has been hurt and has hurt others from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. The connection lies not in identical histories or interchangeable acts, but in the possibility of recognizing one another as human despite those differences. That distinction allows compassion to coexist with justice rather than replacing judgment of what happened.

Mercy against punishment

Stevenson presents the response to brokenness as a choice. People can acknowledge their vulnerability and the compassion that may help with healing, or deny their vulnerability and renounce compassion. The latter choice can disguise fear and anger as toughness. In Stevenson’s account, that fear helps explain the willingness to discard children, disabled people, the sick, and the weak—not because they are necessarily threats to public safety or incapable of rehabilitation, but because harshness can make a society feel less exposed.

The same pattern appears in the treatment of victims and offenders. Survivors of violent crime and people whose loved ones have been murdered are pressured to recycle their pain by directing it back at those prosecuted for the harm. Vengeful punishments can then be legalized, as if having been victimized justified victimizing someone else. Stevenson’s argument does not erase the suffering of victims; it challenges the demand that their pain be converted into cruelty toward another person. Punishing the broken, or walking away and hiding them from view, does not restore wholeness. It ensures that they remain broken and that the wider community does too, because wholeness depends on reciprocal humanity.

Mercy is not merely a feeling in this account. It changes what a person can perceive: through experiencing mercy, Stevenson writes, people learn things that are otherwise hard to learn, see what they otherwise could not see, and hear what they otherwise could not hear. That altered perception makes it possible to recognize humanity in others. Compassion thus has consequences for how justice is imagined and practiced; it resists the assumption that visible suffering should be met with exclusion or punishment alone.

Identity beyond the worst act

Stevenson had often spoken with clients who were despairing about what they had done, what had been done to them, and the painful circumstances in which they found themselves. When they questioned the value of their lives, he reminded them that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” A person who lies is not only a liar; a person who steals is not only a thief; even a person who kills is not only a killer. These examples preserve the seriousness of conduct while refusing to let a single act exhaust a person’s identity.

On the evening of Dill’s execution, Stevenson applied that counsel to himself. His recognition that he was broken did not mean that brokenness was all he was. It gave him a way to understand his own vulnerability without surrendering to despair, and to see mercy as a source of strength. Embracing brokenness can create both a need for mercy and a corresponding need to show it. His reflection therefore turns a principle he had offered clients back toward the advocate himself: the person seeking justice is also implicated in the shared human condition that makes justice matter.

From personal insight to public responsibility

Stevenson extends the expression from individual relationships to public choices. He wonders whether acknowledging weaknesses, deficits, biases, and fears would make people less willing to kill those who have killed others, and more willing to seek ways to care for disabled, abused, neglected, and traumatized people. The point is not that recognition automatically supplies a remedy, but that honest recognition unsettles pride in policies that treat punishment as proof of strength.

In this argument, acknowledging brokenness would make it harder to take pride in mass incarceration, executions, or deliberate indifference to vulnerable people. The expression links private self-recognition to institutional responsibility: a society that denies its own fear and imperfection may hide that denial in harsh policies, while a society willing to face them can ask what care and justice require. Its final emphasis is reciprocal. No one becomes whole by isolating the brokenness of others; compassion begins when human vulnerability is admitted without pretending that every wound, action, or responsibility is the same.