Bryan Stevenson–Eva Ansley partnership

The Bryan Stevenson–Eva Ansley partnership grew from a practical response to a crisis in Alabama’s death-penalty system into the founding work behind the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson brought experience representing condemned people and a reluctance to run a nonprofit; Ansley had already built a prison project that tracked cases and connected death-row prisoners with lawyers. Together they tried to create the legal capacity the state lacked, then kept the effort alive through institutional rejection, precarious finances, and a flood of urgent cases.

The need and the original plan

By the time Stevenson was approaching his fourth year at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, Alabama had nearly a hundred people on death row and the fastest-growing condemned population in the country. Yet the state had no public defender system, leaving many people facing execution without any legal representation. Ansley was running an Alabama prison project that tracked cases and matched condemned men with lawyers; that work offered a way to see both the scale of the need and the gaps in available counsel.

In 1988, the two discovered an opportunity to obtain federal funding for a legal center serving people on death row. They planned to create a nonprofit, establish it in Tuscaloosa, and begin taking cases the following year. Stevenson had already worked on death-penalty cases in several Southern states, sometimes securing a stay only minutes before an electrocution. But he did not think he was ready to shoulder the responsibilities of running a nonprofit law office. His initial plan was to help get the organization started, find a director, and then return to Atlanta. The partnership therefore began not with a settled institutional structure, but with an urgent project Stevenson expected to help launch and then leave in other hands.

Opening in Tuscaloosa

In February 1989, Stevenson and Ansley opened the new nonprofit law center in Tuscaloosa to provide free, quality legal services to condemned men and women in Alabama. The opening turned their funding plan into an operating organization, but the first months exposed how fragile its foundations were. Its first director resigned. The University of Alabama School of Law, where the office had been set up, withdrew both its support and its promise of office space. Recruiting lawyers to move to Alabama and undertake full-time death-penalty work for less than $25,000 a year proved difficult.

Those setbacks were not merely inconveniences: each threatened the basic ability to keep the center staffed and functioning. The partnership had to contend with a mission whose urgency did not supply the resources needed to carry it out. Their original location and institutional backing had seemed like the beginning of a durable operation; within months, both had become uncertain.

Rebuilding in Montgomery

The financial obstacle was especially stark. The center needed state legislative funding to obtain federal matching dollars, but the legislature denied the request. Disheartening meetings with the board made clear that the project had little support in the state. Some state bar leaders did support it, though their reasons differed: some considered it unacceptable for condemned prisoners to lack legal assistance, while others wanted executions to proceed faster and believed the absence of lawyers was slowing them down. The same institution could thus offer support for sharply different reasons, without supplying the public backing the center needed.

Stevenson and Ansley regrouped and decided to start again in Montgomery, the state capital. The project would eventually be named the Equal Justice Initiative. In the summer of 1989, Stevenson found a small building near downtown and the two signed a lease. The rented office was a two-story Greek Revival house built in 1882 near Old Alabama Town. Painted yellow, with a welcoming porch, it offered a striking contrast to the courtrooms, institutional waiting rooms, and prison walls that shaped the lives of clients’ families.

The house was hardly an easy workplace. It was cold in winter, squirrels were difficult to keep out of the attic, and the electrical supply could not reliably run both the copier and a coffeepot without blowing a fuse. Still, from the start it felt like both a home and a place to work. That dual character mattered to a small organization whose work and working hours were already difficult to separate: its office was imperfect, but it was a place the project could claim as its own after losing space and support elsewhere.

Work divided, pressure mounting

Ansley took on the project’s administrative duties, including the complicated reporting and accounting required by federal funding. The work demanded more than keeping the office organized: it involved making sense of complex requirements while trying to secure enough money for the project to continue. She proved resourceful in sorting through the requirements and coaxing a few dollars into the operation. The organization hired a receptionist and tried to establish a way to survive.

Stevenson brought experience raising money for the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, having worked on fundraising there soon after he joined. He believed he could find enough support to meet the Alabama office’s minimum federal matching requirements. The two discussed possible staff recruits, and a foundation appeared to offer new financial support. These efforts show the partnership at work across distinct but connected demands: Ansley handled difficult administration and the flow of scarce funds, while Stevenson pursued fundraising, staffing, and the legal work that gave the office its purpose. The evidence does not portray a settled division of labor so much as a continuing effort to make each essential task possible with very limited resources.

Time, however, was the resource they could not raise. Alabama had carried out only three executions between the passage of its new death-penalty statute in 1975 and the end of 1988. In 1989, changes in the United States Supreme Court’s treatment of death-penalty appeals and shifts in political priorities prompted the attorney general’s office to seek executions aggressively; by the end of that year, Alabama’s number of executions would have doubled. Even before the center opened, Stevenson had begun visiting death row monthly. Clients repeatedly asked him to help Michael Lindsey, whose execution was scheduled for May, and later to help Horace Dunkins, scheduled for July. He explained how little time and capacity the new office had, and although the men said they understood, their anguish remained plain. The partnership’s founding challenge was therefore immediate: build an institution while the people it was meant to serve were already running out of time.

After Herbert Richardson’s execution, Stevenson returned to the office and revised plans for his other clients, determined to improve their chances of avoiding execution. He recognized that this resolve did not undo Richardson’s death, but the work gave him a way to continue. He and Ansley discussed potential staff members; new foundation support seemed possible, and the office equipment they had ordered finally arrived. The small signs of progress did not remove the burden of the work, but they suggested that the center might become more capable of meeting it. The partnership’s significance lies in that sustained construction under pressure: the legal center was not secured by a smooth launch or a dependable institutional base, but assembled through repeated adaptation as urgent cases accumulated.