Black History Month Heroes: Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has dedicated his life to outing and challenging biases within the criminal justice system that denigrate poor people of color. After receiving his degree from Harvard Law School in 1985, Stevenson dismissed the idea of pursuing a corporate career to instead focus on what he felt was tangible and real—campaigning against the death penalty.

In 1987, Stevenson worked as legal researcher on McCleskey v. Kemp, a Supreme Court case involving a black man convicted in Georgia of killing a white police officer during a robbery. Much of the defense was based around the Baldus study, a study that statistically illustrated that black defendants in murder trials were disproportionately sentenced to death over their white counterparts when the victim was white. Conversely, the Baldus study showed that white defendants in murder trials were handed the death penalty at a lower percentage rate if the victim was black. McClesky’s team unsuccessfully tried to strike down the death penalty on the premise that the death sentence violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment and Equal Protection Clause.

In the early 1990s, Stevenson was doing prison reform work in Alabama when he took a case representing Walter McMillian, a death-row inmate convicted of the murder of a white teenage female store clerk. Incarcerated even before his trial, McMillian spent six years on Alabama’s death-row, four times appealing the court’s decision and maintaining his innocence throughout. Stevenson was able to prove McMillian’s innocence by divulging evidence that had been concealed during McMillian’s original trial. Notwithstanding McMillian’s innocence, Stevenson maintains that “the real question isn’t whether some people deserve to die for crimes they may have committed. The real question is whether a state such as Alabama, with its racist legacy and error-plagued system of justice, deserves to kill.”

Today Bryan Stevenson is a professor of clinical law at NYU. In and out of the classroom, he continues to advocate for prison reform. His work with the Equal Justice Initiative has expanded beyond capital punishment to include providing counseling for the poor, exposing sentencing bias, reducing excessive sentences, parole reform, addressing mass incarceration, and backing the reform and reentry of convicted juveniles. In Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, two cases that went before the Supreme Court, Stevenson successfully argued that it was unconstitutional for minors guilty of non-homicidal crimes to serve life sentences without parole. Most recently he was appointed by President Obama to serve on the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and published “Just Mercy,” a narrative of the work he’s done with his clients.

Sources

• Applebome, Peter. “Alabama Releases Man Held On Death Row for Six Years.” New York Times 3 Mar. 1993. Print.
• “Bryan Stevenson achieves latest victory before Supreme Court,” NYU Law, accessed February 6, 2015, http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/STEVENSON_BRYAN_MILLER_OPINION.
• Equal Justice Inititative, accessed February 6, 2015, www.eji.org.
• “The Loss of Constitutional Faith: McCleskey v. Kemp and the Dark Side of Procedure,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, 10.1 (2012): 9-19, accessed February 5, 2015, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/osjcl/files/2012/12/2.-Sundby.pdf.