How to Write Your Two-Paragraph Response on Marsha Colbey’s Case in Just Mercy
A section-by-section guide for students responding to Part 2/3 of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy — covering how to explain Colbey’s case accurately, what systemic forces to analyze, how to structure your fairness argument, and what separates a surface response from a substantive one.
The two-paragraph response on Marsha Colbey’s case is one of the most deceptively simple assignments in a Just Mercy course — and one of the most frequently underwritten. Students summarize what happened and say it was unfair, but stop well short of engaging with why the system responded the way it did and what that reveals about structural bias. This guide explains how to approach all three required parts — the case explanation, the standout systemic response, and the fairness argument — with the depth and specificity the assignment is calling for.
This is not a plot summary assignment. Writing “Marsha Colbey had a stillbirth and was convicted, which was unfair” satisfies none of the three required parts at a meaningful level. The prompt explicitly asks you to consider how gender, trauma, and lack of understanding shaped the outcome — meaning the assignment is asking for analysis of systemic forces, not a retelling of events. The “standout” question is asking for your critical observation about the system’s behavior, not just a description of what happened to Marsha. Your fairness argument must be supported with reasoning drawn from the text and, ideally, from what you understand about how gender and poverty intersect with the criminal justice system.
What This Guide Covers
What the Assignment Is Actually Testing
The three-part prompt — explain the case, identify what stood out, argue whether treatment was fair — is designed to test three distinct skills simultaneously. The first part tests reading comprehension and the ability to summarize accurately without distorting facts. The second part tests critical observation: can you identify the most analytically significant aspect of the system’s response, rather than just restating what happened? The third part tests your ability to construct and defend an argument with reasoning, not just express a feeling.
Bryan Stevenson structures Just Mercy around cases that expose systemic failures — not just individual injustices. When Stevenson presents Marsha Colbey’s case, he is not simply telling a sad story. He is demonstrating how the criminal justice system weaponizes poverty, misreads trauma, and substitutes moral judgment for medical understanding when it encounters women who do not fit its expectations. Your response should reflect that analytical purpose — engaging with the system’s logic, not just its cruelty.
Marsha Colbey’s Case: What You Need to Know
Marsha Colbey was a poor Arkansas woman who experienced a traumatic stillbirth. Her baby was stillborn — meaning the infant died in the womb before delivery — a medical event that carries no criminal liability in itself. The prosecution alleged, however, that the death was not a stillbirth but a live birth followed by murder, and Colbey was convicted of capital murder. Stevenson presents her case as an example of the criminal justice system’s failure to distinguish between a medical tragedy and a crime, and its particular failure when that distinction involves a poor woman with limited access to competent legal defense and medical expertise.
The critical facts of the case for your response are: the medical ambiguity between stillbirth and live birth; the prosecution’s reliance on medical testimony that was contested or later discredited; Colbey’s poverty, which limited her access to expert witnesses who could counter the prosecution’s medical narrative; and the emotional and social context in which she was judged — a poor woman, in the South, whose behavior in the aftermath of a traumatic loss was interpreted through a lens of suspicion rather than a lens of grief. Stevenson’s intervention involved challenging the reliability of the forensic evidence and the quality of her original legal representation.
The medical distinction between stillbirth and live birth is not a technicality — it is the entire legal question in Colbey’s case. A stillbirth is the death of a fetus before or during delivery; there is no live person, and therefore no crime. A live birth followed by death opens the possibility of criminal prosecution. The prosecution’s case depended on a jury accepting contested medical testimony that the baby was born alive. Colbey’s poverty meant she could not afford independent forensic experts to challenge that testimony. When you explain the case in Paragraph One, this distinction must be in your summary — it is what the prosecution’s theory and Stevenson’s challenge both hinge on.
How to Build Paragraph One: The Case Explanation + Standout Observation
The prompt asks you to “briefly explain what happened” and then move to what “stood out most” — both within two paragraphs total. The most effective approach is to handle the case explanation in your first paragraph and use it as a launching pad for your standout observation, so the paragraph has a beginning (what happened), a middle (the systemic observation that strikes you most), and a trajectory toward your second paragraph’s fairness argument.
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Open with the core facts — specific and accurate (2–3 sentences)
Identify Marsha Colbey by name, the event (stillbirth), and the charge (capital murder conviction). State the central legal issue: whether the birth was a stillbirth or a live birth. Do not editorialize yet — save your analysis for the standout observation and Paragraph Two. Accuracy here matters: calling the event an “abortion” or a “miscarriage” instead of a stillbirth misrepresents the case.
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Identify the compounding factors that shaped the outcome (2–3 sentences)
Her poverty, the lack of competent expert testimony on her behalf, the geographic and social context of a poor Southern woman facing a capital charge — these are not background color. They are structural conditions that the prompt specifically asks you to consider. Introduce them as factors that shaped what the system was able to do to her, not just as unfortunate circumstances.
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State your standout observation to close the paragraph (1–2 sentences)
End Paragraph One by identifying what struck you most. This is the pivot from summary to analysis. A strong standout observation names a specific systemic dynamic — not just “it was unfair” — and sets up the fairness argument you will make in Paragraph Two.
What Paragraph One Should NOT Do
Do not retell the entire chapter. Do not include details that are not relevant to the three questions (case facts, standout observation, fairness argument). Do not leave the standout observation vague — “what stood out to me was how she was treated” is not an analytical observation; it is a restatement of the prompt. The standout observation must name the specific mechanism of the system’s failure: the substitution of punitive suspicion for medical understanding, the punishment of poverty through unequal access to expert witnesses, or the gendered expectation that a grieving mother should perform grief in a particular way to be believed.
What “Stood Out Most” Means — and How to Answer It Well
The standout question is not asking for the most emotionally affecting part of the chapter. It is asking you to identify the most analytically significant aspect of the system’s response to Colbey’s situation. “Analytically significant” means: the aspect that best reveals how and why the system failed, not just that it did fail. Three angles work well for this specific case — each corresponding to one of the three lenses the prompt names.
The Gender Lens: Suspicion as the Default
What stands out through the gender lens is that Colbey’s behavior after the loss — however she grieved, however she acted — was read through a framework of suspicion rather than a framework of trauma. Women who experience pregnancy loss while poor are disproportionately investigated and prosecuted in the United States. The system treated her grief as evidence of guilt rather than as a normal response to catastrophic loss. This is the gendered default: a woman who loses a baby is assumed to be explaining something she caused, not experiencing something that happened to her.
The Trauma Lens: Misreading Grief as Behavior
Through the trauma lens, what stands out is the system’s inability — or refusal — to distinguish between traumatic behavior and culpable behavior. Traumatic grief does not present uniformly. A woman who has just experienced a stillbirth may appear flat, avoidant, dissociated, or agitated. Each of these can be misread by investigators and jurors as “suspicious” behavior. The system had no framework for interpreting Colbey’s responses as what they were: symptoms of acute trauma, not evidence of a crime.
The Poverty Lens: Unequal Access to Medical Truth
Through the poverty lens, what stands out is that the outcome depended almost entirely on which side could afford better forensic expertise. A contested medical question — stillbirth vs. live birth — should be resolved by science. But science costs money in a courtroom. The prosecution had state resources. Colbey had a public defender without the budget for independent forensic experts. Her conviction was not primarily the product of evidence — it was the product of resource inequality determining which scientific narrative the jury heard.
You do not need to use all three lenses — that would make Paragraph One too long. Choose the one that genuinely struck you most from your reading, develop it with one or two specific observations drawn from the text, and use it to build toward your Paragraph Two argument. The most powerful responses pick one lens and use it precisely, rather than gesturing at all three vaguely.
Analyzing Gender, Trauma, and Poverty: What Each Lens Reveals
The prompt names three specific analytical lenses — gender, trauma, and lack of understanding (which encompasses both medical misunderstanding and the broader failure to comprehend the realities of poverty). Understanding what each lens actually reveals about the system’s response gives you the analytical content your response needs.
How to Build Paragraph Two: The Fairness Argument
Paragraph Two must do two things: state your position on whether Marsha Colbey was treated fairly, and support that position with reasoning drawn from the text and from the analytical lenses introduced in Paragraph One. A position without reasoning is an opinion. An opinion supported by analysis of specific systemic failures is an argument. The assignment is asking for the latter.
That framing — “not simply unfair but the predictable outcome of specific systemic dynamics” — is the analytical level Paragraph Two should aim for. It moves past the emotional response (of course it was unfair) to the analytical claim (here is specifically how and why the system produced this outcome, and what that reveals about its structure).
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State your position directly in the first sentence (1 sentence)
Do not hedge. “No, Marsha Colbey was not treated fairly” is a complete position statement. “I think in some ways she wasn’t treated fairly but it’s complicated” is not — it signals that you are avoiding the analytical work of defending a position. Take a clear stand in your opening sentence. The prompt asks “Do you believe…” which is an invitation to commit to a view and defend it.
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Develop the systemic reasoning — connect it to what you introduced in Paragraph One (3–4 sentences)
This is the analytical core. Take the standout observation from Paragraph One and extend it into a fairness argument. If your standout was poverty’s role in unequal access to expert witnesses, your fairness argument should explain why that inequality is a structural injustice — not just an unfortunate circumstance — and why it means the outcome cannot be called fair regardless of what the jury decided. Connect your reasoning to Stevenson’s broader argument in the book about how the justice system treats the poor and marginalized.
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Address the complexity without abandoning your position (1–2 sentences)
A strong fairness argument acknowledges the system’s claimed logic — the prosecution did present evidence, a jury did convict — without letting that acknowledgment undermine your position. You can recognize that the system followed its procedures while arguing that those procedures are themselves unjust when applied in conditions of radical resource inequality and medical ambiguity. Stevenson’s entire project in Just Mercy is demonstrating that procedural compliance does not equal justice.
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Close with a sentence that connects back to Just Mercy‘s larger argument (1 sentence)
End Paragraph Two by connecting Colbey’s case to Stevenson’s broader theme. Her case is not an isolated aberration — it is one instance of a pattern Stevenson documents throughout the book: the system’s consistent failure to extend justice to the poor, the traumatized, and those who do not fit the narratives power recognizes as legitimate. Closing with this connection demonstrates that you are reading the case analytically, within the context of the book’s argument, not just reacting to it emotionally.
Using a Systemic Lens: What Stevenson Is Showing Through Colbey’s Case
Bryan Stevenson does not present Marsha Colbey’s case as a story about one bad prosecutor or one biased jury. He presents it as a case study in how multiple systemic failures compound to produce an unjust outcome for someone who had no structural resources to resist them. Understanding this authorial intention is what separates a textually grounded response from one that merely reacts to the story.
How Multiple Failures Stack in Colbey’s Case
Stevenson is a lawyer and an activist, and he writes like one: every case he presents is chosen because it illustrates a systemic argument, not because it is exceptional. Colbey’s case illustrates the compounding logic of disadvantage in the justice system — each individual failure (inadequate counsel, no expert witnesses, gender bias in how her grief was read, medical ambiguity resolved against her) is bad enough alone. Together, they produce a certainty of unjust outcome that no individual element could have produced alone. When you analyze this case in your response, you should reflect that stacking dynamic — not treat each factor as independent.
Pregnancy Loss Prosecutions and the Criminalization of Poor Mothers
Colbey’s case is not isolated. Scholars and legal advocates have documented a sustained pattern in the U.S. of prosecuting poor women — particularly poor women of color — for adverse pregnancy outcomes. Lynn Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin’s landmark study, published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law in 2013, documented 413 cases over three decades in which women were arrested, detained, or forced to undergo medical procedures because of their pregnancy outcomes or behavior during pregnancy. Poor women, rural women, and women with substance use histories were dramatically overrepresented. Colbey’s case fits squarely within this documented pattern. This is the verified external source that can ground your analysis in documented reality beyond the book itself.
What Just Mercy Argues About Who the System Fails
A central argument of Just Mercy is that proximity to suffering produces understanding, and that the justice system systematically keeps those with decision-making power away from the human realities of the people it processes. Judges, prosecutors, and juries rarely have proximity to poverty, to traumatic grief, or to the medical realities of pregnancy loss without resources. Stevenson argues — through Colbey’s case and others — that this distance produces moral errors that are dressed up as legal conclusions. Your response should reflect this: the system did not simply make an error about evidence. It made a moral error rooted in distance from the reality of Marsha Colbey’s life.
Thesis Framing Options for the Fairness Question
The fairness question at the center of Paragraph Two has one defensible answer for most students engaging seriously with Stevenson’s text: no, she was not treated fairly. But the quality of your response depends on how you frame and defend that position, not just that you hold it. Below are three framing options at different analytical levels — choose the one that best fits how you want to develop the argument.
| Framing Level | Position Statement | Analytical Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Surface (avoid this) | “Marsha Colbey was not treated fairly because what happened to her was not her fault.” | Lowest — makes a causal claim without engaging the system’s logic. Does not address gender, trauma, or poverty as analytical categories. Could apply to any unjust conviction with no case-specific analysis. |
| Intermediate | “Marsha Colbey was not treated fairly because her poverty prevented her from accessing the expert witnesses that could have established reasonable doubt about the medical evidence.” | Better — identifies a specific, case-relevant systemic failure and connects it to the outcome. Engages with the poverty lens. Still does not connect to the gender or trauma dimensions the prompt names. |
| Strong | “No — the system’s response to Marsha Colbey was not fair because it substituted punitive suspicion for medical understanding, read her traumatic grief as evidence of guilt, and resolved contested forensic evidence against her because she could not afford to challenge it. These are not independent failures — they are interlocking features of a system that Stevenson argues consistently fails the poor and marginalized.” | Strongest — names all three analytical lenses the prompt raises, frames them as interlocking rather than independent, and connects to Stevenson’s broader argument. Specific enough to demonstrate textual engagement, analytical enough to demonstrate critical reading. |
Using Textual Evidence Correctly in a Short Response
A two-paragraph response does not require formal citations or a reference list in the way a research paper does — but it does require textual grounding. That means your analytical claims should be connected to specific details from the chapter, not just to your general impressions of the book. There are three ways to ground your response in the text without making it unwieldy.
Specific Reference Without Formal Citation
In a discussion post or short response, you can reference the text without full MLA/APA apparatus by identifying the case, the chapter context, and the specific detail you are drawing on. Example: “Stevenson describes how Colbey’s defense lacked the resources to retain independent forensic experts, leaving the jury with only the prosecution’s medical narrative.” This is specific enough to show you read the chapter and are drawing on its content, without requiring a page number in every sentence.
- Use character names and case-specific details, not generic references
- Summarize specific events or arguments rather than quoting where possible
- If your instructor expects citations, include page numbers in parentheses after each reference
Connecting Case Details to Analytical Claims
The strongest analytical moves in this response connect a specific textual detail to a broader systemic claim. The structure is: [specific detail from the chapter] → [systemic dynamic it illustrates] → [why that dynamic is relevant to the fairness question]. Example: “The fact that Colbey could not afford independent forensic experts [specific detail] illustrates how poverty determines whose medical account a jury hears [systemic dynamic], which means the outcome was shaped by resource inequality rather than evidentiary truth [relevance to fairness].” That chain of reasoning — detail to dynamic to claim — is what makes an analytical response.
- Always move from specific to analytical — not from general to specific
- Do not let a textual detail stand alone without drawing the analytical conclusion
- Connect each detail back to gender, trauma, or poverty as the prompt names them
Lynn Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin’s peer-reviewed study, “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005,” published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (2013, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 299–343), documents the systematic prosecution of women for adverse pregnancy outcomes across three decades. Their findings — that poor women, women of color, and women with substance use histories were dramatically overrepresented among those prosecuted — provide direct empirical support for the systemic pattern Stevenson is illustrating through Colbey’s case. If your instructor asks for external sources in your response or you want to strengthen your analysis, this study is the appropriate scholarly citation: Paltrow, L. M., & Flavin, J. (2013). Arrests of and forced interventions on pregnant women in the United States, 1973–2005. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 38(2), 299–343.
Full Structure and Pre-Submission Checklist
The complete two-paragraph response should follow this architecture. Every element below corresponds to one of the three prompt requirements (case explanation, standout observation, fairness argument) and one or more of the three analytical lenses (gender, trauma, poverty/lack of understanding).
Recommended Response Architecture
Paragraph One (5–7 sentences)
Sentences 1–2: State who Marsha Colbey is, what happened (stillbirth), and what the legal outcome was (capital murder conviction). Include the central legal ambiguity (stillbirth vs. live birth).
Sentences 3–4: Identify the structural conditions that shaped the outcome — poverty, lack of expert witness access, the system’s reading of her behavior. These are not background; they are causal factors.
Sentences 5–7: State your standout observation — what aspect of the system’s response struck you most, framed as a systemic observation (not just “it was sad”). This is your pivot from summary to analysis and sets up Paragraph Two.
Paragraph Two (5–7 sentences)
Sentence 1: State your fairness position directly. No hedging.
Sentences 2–4: Develop the systemic reasoning. Connect your standout observation to your fairness argument. Name the specific mechanism of failure (gender bias, trauma misreading, resource inequality, or all three). Ground each claim in a specific detail from the chapter.
Sentences 5–6: Address complexity without abandoning your position. Acknowledge the system’s procedural claim (it followed its rules) while arguing those rules are themselves unjust when applied in these conditions.
Sentence 7: Connect to Stevenson’s broader argument about proximity, understanding, and the justice system’s consistent failure of the poor and marginalized.
- Paragraph One names Marsha Colbey by name and accurately identifies the event as a stillbirth — not a miscarriage, abortion, or infant death from other causes
- The stillbirth vs. live birth distinction is present in the case explanation — this is the legal hinge of the entire case
- Poverty’s role in limiting access to expert witnesses is acknowledged as a structural factor, not just a sad circumstance
- The standout observation names a specific systemic dynamic — not just “I was surprised by how she was treated”
- At least one of the three named lenses (gender, trauma, lack of understanding/poverty) is explicitly developed in the response
- Paragraph Two opens with a clear, direct position statement on the fairness question — no hedging
- The fairness argument is supported with reasoning connected to specific details from the chapter — not just a general claim
- The response acknowledges the system’s procedural logic without letting that acknowledgment undercut the fairness argument
- The response connects to Stevenson’s broader argument, not just to this one case in isolation
- No full paragraphs are spent retelling the plot — the summary is brief and the analysis is substantive
Where Most Responses on This Prompt Lose Points
Summary Without Analysis
“Marsha Colbey had a stillbirth and was convicted of murder. This was very sad and showed how the system fails people. She was treated unfairly because she did not commit a crime.” This response summarizes and states a conclusion but performs no analysis. It does not engage with gender, trauma, or poverty as analytical categories. It does not connect the outcome to systemic dynamics. It could have been written without reading the chapter. It earns credit for basic reading comprehension only.
Instead
Name the specific systemic failure and connect it to the outcome: “What stood out most was how poverty transformed a contested medical question into a certainty of conviction. Because Colbey could not afford independent forensic experts, the jury never heard evidence that could have established reasonable doubt about the cause of death — meaning her fate was determined by resource inequality, not by the weight of the evidence.” That is the analytical level the prompt is looking for.
Vague Standout Observation
“What stood out to me most was how the system treated her. It seemed like they didn’t care about what really happened and just wanted to punish her.” This is a feeling, not an observation. It does not identify a specific mechanism, name a specific dynamic (gender, trauma, poverty), or demonstrate that you are reading the case analytically. It is also not specific to Marsha Colbey — it could describe any unjust conviction in any context.
Instead
Identify the specific dynamic: “What stood out most was the system’s substitution of gendered moral judgment for medical understanding. Rather than treating Colbey’s situation as a medical tragedy requiring investigation, prosecutors and investigators appear to have begun from an assumption that a poor woman in her circumstances must have done something wrong — and then built a case backward from that assumption. Stevenson makes clear that her behavior after the loss, interpreted as suspicious, was consistent with acute traumatic grief — a distinction the system had no framework for making.”
Fairness Argument That Hedges
“On one hand, the jury followed the evidence they were presented with, so in some ways the system did its job. On the other hand, she probably didn’t get a fair trial because she was poor. So it’s hard to say whether she was treated fairly or not.” This is not an argument — it is the avoidance of one. The prompt asks for your belief and why. Refusing to commit to a position and support it is the most common way students underperform on this prompt.
Instead
Commit to a position and defend it directly: “No, Marsha Colbey was not treated fairly. A system that resolves contested forensic evidence against a defendant because she cannot afford to challenge it is not delivering justice — it is delivering an outcome shaped by poverty. The jury may have followed the rules it was given, but those rules operated in conditions — no competent expert witnesses, a medical question the jury had no tools to evaluate independently — that made a fair outcome structurally impossible from the start.” That is an argument, not a survey of both sides.
Failing to Connect to Stevenson’s Argument
A response that treats Colbey’s case as an isolated tragedy — terrible but exceptional — misses the entire analytical point of Just Mercy. Stevenson does not present exceptional cases. He presents cases that document patterns. A response that ends with “hopefully this doesn’t happen to anyone else” is reading the book as a collection of sad stories rather than as an argument about systemic injustice. The book is making a claim about how the system works, not about how it occasionally fails.
Instead
Connect explicitly to the book’s structural argument: “Colbey’s case is not an aberration in Stevenson’s account — it is one instance of a pattern he documents throughout Just Mercy: the justice system’s systematic failure to extend equal protection to those without economic and social resources. The same compounding logic of disadvantage that Stevenson identifies in death row cases involving intellectual disability and youth also operates here — poverty, lack of expert access, and the system’s unwillingness to look closely at human complexity combine to produce an outcome that the system can call legal, but that Stevenson makes clear is not just.”