Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” is the moral hinge between judgment and mercy in Bryan Stevenson’s account. Invoked during a church meeting about Walter McMillian’s case, the saying challenges a community that could recognize an injustice yet hesitate to support the accused because of his private conduct. Its companion image, the stonecatcher, turns the lesson into a practice: rather than add to the punishment people inflict on one another, someone can step forward to absorb some of that harm.

The Saying and Its Biblical Scene

Bryan recalls the biblical scene in which a woman accused of adultery is brought before Jesus by people who want to stone her. Jesus tells them, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The accusers retreat; Jesus forgives the woman and urges her to sin no more. In Stevenson’s retelling, the saying does not deny wrongdoing. It places the accusers’ own fallibility beside their desire to punish, making humility a condition of judgment.

That distinction matters throughout the book’s account of criminal punishment. Mercy is not presented as indifference to harm or as a claim that everyone is innocent. It challenges the assumption that condemnation alone can answer suffering, and asks whether those who punish have acknowledged their own capacity for error, fear, and anger.

The McMillian Case and the Church Meeting

At a regional church meeting about Walter McMillian, some members of the African American community offered muted support. Stevenson says this was not because they believed McMillian guilty, but because he had had an extramarital affair and was not active in the church. Stevenson spoke mainly about the case, then recalled the saying as a rebuke to the impulse to withdraw compassion from someone judged morally unworthy.

He argued that self-righteousness, fear, and anger can lead even Christians to cast stones at people who have fallen, despite knowing that forgiveness and compassion are called for. He told the congregation that it could not simply watch this happen: it had to become a community of stonecatchers. The saying thus shifts the question from whether McMillian had lived without fault to whether his neighbors would let disapproval eclipse the injustice of his prosecution.

Stevenson later explained that McMillian had taught him how fear and anger can make a community, state, or nation blind and dangerous. He also connected the case to a system that gives the poor less access to legal help and can treat wealth and status as more important than culpability. The saying’s challenge to human certainty therefore reaches beyond personal forgiveness: it asks what kind of judgment a society builds when it is willing to discard vulnerable people.

Stonecatching in Practice

The stonecatcher image becomes concrete in Stevenson’s conversation with an older woman at a courthouse. Her sixteen-year-old grandson had been murdered by other boys. She had attended their trials, cried through the proceedings, and expected their convictions and permanent imprisonment to ease her grief; instead, she felt worse. After the sentencing, an unknown woman sat with her for nearly two hours, offering company and a place to lean without demanding that she speak. She never forgot the comfort of that presence.

Over time, the grandmother began seeking out people grieving violent deaths, then widened her care to anyone who needed to lean on her—including people whose children or parents were on trial. She described the pain of children sent to prison forever, families harmed by violence, and judges treating people as if they were not human. She called her purpose catching some of the stones people cast at one another. Recognizing Stevenson from his earlier remarks, she told him she knew he was a stonecatcher too. Her story makes the saying reciprocal: compassion for defendants need not erase victims’ grief, and care for victims need not require indifference to the suffering of defendants’ families.

A different example comes through Debbie Baigre, the woman Ian Manuel shot when he was thirteen. On a prison phone call, Manuel apologized and expressed remorse. Baigre was startled but moved; their call became a regular correspondence. After years of contact, she urged the judge to reconsider his harsh sentence and condemned the inhumane conditions of his confinement, while expressly acknowledging the destructiveness of his crime. Her response embodies the distinction at the heart of the saying: taking harm seriously does not require treating a person as nothing more than the harm he caused.

Mercy, Accountability, and the Limits of Punishment

Stevenson presents McMillian’s response as the saying’s most demanding application. McMillian forgave those who had falsely accused and convicted him, as well as those who had judged him unworthy of mercy. Stevenson argues that mercy rooted in hope can be most transformative when offered to people who have not earned it or even asked for it. In this account, forgiveness does not make the wrongful conviction just; it helps explain how McMillian could recover a life marked by love and freedom despite it.

The saying also sits beside an unresolved grief. After a church service, Stevenson looked down the road and thought about the fact that no one had been prosecuted for Ronda Morrison’s murder after McMillian’s release, and about the anguish that must remain for her parents. That reflection keeps compassion from becoming a tidy ending: mercy toward the wrongly condemned does not settle every question of accountability or repair the loss experienced by victims’ families.

The expression’s larger force lies in holding these truths together. People can be responsible for serious harm and still possess a dignity that punishment should not erase; victims and their families deserve compassion without being used to justify cruelty toward others. By turning the image of the first stone into the work of catching stones, the book asks readers to replace reflexive condemnation with humility, humane judgment, and a willingness to recognize suffering across the boundaries a criminal case creates.