On January 6, 2020, Microsoft Corporation rented out 32 AMC Cinemas across the US and offered paid time off and movie tickets to all US employees to attend a private screening of Just Mercy.
Offered for free to rent on streaming in June 2020 by Warner Bros. in response to protests over the death of George Floyd and police brutality outrage.
In one scene, Bryan and Eva are sitting on the banks of the Alabama River watching a recreation of a 19th-century riverboat (the Harriott) sail by. Bryan says to Eva, "Nobody wants to remember that this is where thousands of enslaved people were shipped in and paraded up the street to be sold. Ten miles from here, black people were pulled from their homes and lynched and nobody talks about it." This is a nod to the fact that years after this movie takes place, during the 2000s, Stevenson's organization the Equal Justice Initiative expanded its mission; although it continues to provide legal defense and advocacy for prisoners on death row, children in adult prisons, people who have been wrongfully convicted, and others in need of defense, they also started to memorialize the history of slavery and lynching in America. In April 2018, EJI opened two new facilities. One was the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, a museum located in a former warehouse where black people were enslaved in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The other was National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people and people terrorized and murdered by lynching. EJI also works with communities to install historical markers that acknowledge lynchings in those cities' pasts.
In a November 21, 2018, interview with Michael B. Jordan on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Jordan said that Just Mercy (2019) was the first movie he had made with an Inclusion Rider. He said, "It looked and felt like a set that I've always wanted to have."
The roadblock scene was not intended to be a night scene. The film crew was delayed for almost four hours due to storms and it pushed the filming back to nighttime.