Brokenness

Brokenness is the book’s name for a shared human vulnerability that can be inflicted by circumstance, illness, poverty, violence, and injustice, as well as by choices that harm others. It does not make suffering equal or wrongdoing harmless. Instead, it challenges the idea that a person can be reduced to a crime, a disability, or a wound—and argues that recognizing vulnerability is necessary to justice and mercy.

Recognition at the point of execution

The concept becomes explicit while Bryan Stevenson is on the phone with Jimmy Dill, who is struggling to speak as his execution approaches. Dill thanks Stevenson for fighting for him and caring about him. Stevenson tries not to let Dill hear him crying, but after the call he sits in his crowded office, surrounded by files containing other people’s painful histories, and feels that he cannot continue. The execution does not appear as an abstraction about punishment: it is the immediate human consequence of a system acting upon a man Stevenson understands as both responsible for harm and deeply shaped by hardship and disability.

Stevenson’s first response is exhaustion. He questions whether he should leave, and wonders why he has tried to repair situations that seem irreparably damaged. That crisis turns inward. After more than twenty-five years of work, he recognizes that commitment to the work is not simply an obligation or a professional necessity. His realization is direct: “I do what I do because I’m broken, too.” The shift matters because he does not claim a distance from the people he represents. Their suffering has exposed something about his own vulnerability, making his work a relationship of human recognition rather than an exercise in standing above them.

Unequal wounds, shared humanity

Stevenson carefully distinguishes shared brokenness from equivalence. He writes that people have both hurt others and been hurt, while emphasizing that their injuries and actions are not interchangeable. His experience of being hurt, and of hurting others, is different from what Dill suffered and did. Their connection does not erase those differences; it makes them a reason to resist treating either person as beyond human regard. The concept therefore offers neither an excuse for violence nor a claim that every person has suffered equally. It rejects the inference that wrongdoing cancels a person’s humanity.

The cases surrounding this reflection give that distinction concrete stakes. Trina Garnett grew up as the youngest of twelve children in impoverished Chester, Pennsylvania, where nearly 46 percent of children lived below the federal poverty level. Her home was marked by violence against her mother and the children, and her mother’s death, abuse, and desperate circumstances worsened Trina’s mental-health problems. At fourteen, she entered a house with a friend, lit matches to find the boys’ room, and a fire killed two sleeping children. Although the girls maintained that the fire was accidental, Trina was tried as an adult; her appointed lawyer did not pursue an incompetency determination or challenge the adult trial. She was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to mandatory life without parole, even though the judge found she had no intent to kill and could not take her age, illness, poverty, or abuse into account at sentencing. Her story shows how a child’s harm and culpability can be real while a rigid system refuses to consider the conditions that shaped her life.

Other cases show how poverty, disability, gender, and inadequate legal assistance can converge. Marsha Colbey was charged with capital murder after her baby was stillborn, on the basis of forensic conclusions that were challenged by medical experts. In Victoria Banks’s case, an intellectually disabled woman was coerced into pleading guilty to killing an infant who had never existed; her freedom came after the defense established that a tubal ligation years before her arrest made pregnancy impossible. These accounts do not treat vulnerability as a substitute for evidence. They show how a person’s marginalization can make an unsupported accusation more powerful and meaningful help harder to obtain.

Joe Sullivan’s experience supplies another contrast between a person’s life and the label imposed on him. At thirteen, he had mental disabilities, read at a first-grade level, had experienced abuse and severe neglect, and had lived at no fewer than ten addresses in three years. Yet he was sentenced to life without parole, while officials characterized him as a violent recidivist despite a juvenile record consisting mostly of nonviolent, misdemeanor-level incidents and only one prior court adjudication. The brokenness framework asks readers to notice the distance between those circumstances and the official description—not to deny the charged offense, but to question a judgment that turns a vulnerable child into a fixed category.

From personal insight to social criticism

Stevenson broadens the idea beyond clients and advocates. He sees brokenness in the justice system, in people affected by mental illness, poverty, racism, disease, drugs, alcohol, fear, and anger, and in those whose commitment to fairness has been weakened by prejudice and hopelessness. The point is not that every participant occupies the same position of power or bears the same responsibility. A person condemned by the system and a person empowered to condemn are connected by human vulnerability, but they do not face the same consequences or possess the same authority.

That distinction grounds the book’s criticism of punishment as a display of toughness. Stevenson thinks of those who celebrate Dill’s death, and of a society that discards children, the disabled, the sick, and the weak while presenting harsh punishment as strength. He also considers victims of violent crime and survivors of murder, whose pain can be redirected toward offenders as a demand for retaliatory punishment. Recognizing shared brokenness does not dismiss victims’ suffering. It questions a system that answers one person’s victimization by authorizing the victimization of another, and that mistakes cruelty for repair.

Mercy, identity, and the possibility of healing

The ethical consequence of the concept is a refusal to reduce people to their worst acts. Stevenson recalls telling despairing clients, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” He applies the same principle to himself: a person may be broken without being only broken. A lie does not make someone nothing but a liar; taking what belongs to another does not make that person nothing but a thief; even killing someone does not make that person nothing but a killer. Such language does not erase accountability. It insists that accountability need not require the destruction of identity.

Stevenson connects the recognition of vulnerability to the capacity to give and receive mercy. Acknowledging weakness, deficits, bias, and fear may make people more willing to seek care for those who are disabled, abused, neglected, or traumatized, rather than hiding them or punishing them for being visibly vulnerable. In his account, mercy allows people to perceive a humanity that fear and condemnation obscure. It is therefore not a sentimental alternative to justice, but a condition for responding to harm without reproducing it.

The image of broken bones gives the idea its bodily force. Stevenson recalls that Paul Farmer once quoted Thomas Merton to him: “We are bodies of broken bones.” He also remembers a line from a hymn sung in the Black church in Philadelphia where he worked as a college student: “Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.” The memory acquires new meaning as he sits with the anguish of Dill’s execution. Brokenness names pain, but it also makes healing, comfort, and compassion imaginable. The chapter’s conclusion is not that suffering makes people good or that every wound can be repaired. It is that denying shared vulnerability entrenches cruelty, while acknowledging it can renew the desire to act justly and to show mercy.