Equal Justice Initiative

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a Montgomery-based legal and advocacy organization whose work links individual representation to challenges against excessive punishment, wrongful convictions, racial bias, and the historical narratives that shape criminal justice. It began as an effort to secure legal assistance for condemned prisoners, but developed into a broader institution representing people on death row, children prosecuted as adults, incarcerated women and men, and people sentenced unfairly. Its history is marked by the practical work of building a small office, the expansion of its legal mission, and an increasing commitment to public education and support beyond the courtroom.

Founding and the Montgomery office

Bryan Stevenson and Eva Ansley had first tried to establish a project with outside institutional support. When the Alabama Legislature denied the funding needed to obtain federal matching dollars, meetings with the project’s board made clear that there was no state backing for the plan. Some state bar leaders supported legal assistance because they considered it unacceptable for condemned prisoners to lack counsel; others wanted more executions and regarded the absence of lawyers as a delay. Stevenson and Ansley concluded that they would have to raise the money themselves. They regrouped in Montgomery, and the project eventually became the Equal Justice Initiative.

In the summer of 1989, they leased a small, two-story Greek Revival house near downtown Montgomery, close to the historic district known as Old Alabama Town. Built in 1882 and painted yellow, the house had a porch that seemed welcoming beside the courtrooms, institutional waiting rooms, and prison walls that shaped many clients’ families’ lives. It was also an imperfect workplace: the office was cold in winter, squirrels repeatedly got into the attic, and the electrical supply could not run a copier and a coffeepot at the same time without blowing a fuse. Its homelike character and its daily inconveniences both became part of the setting in which the organization’s work took shape.

Legal representation and the expanding mission

EJI’s initial work centered on people facing execution and the absence of adequate legal assistance. After the execution of Herbert Richardson, Stevenson returned to his office and revised plans for helping other clients avoid execution. The planning could not undo Richardson’s death, but it reinforced the need to recruit staff and secure resources. At that point, the organization was discussing potential recruits, possible foundation support had emerged, and the office equipment it had ordered finally arrived. The small practical signs of a functioning office accompanied a growing awareness of the scale of the work ahead.

The organization’s mission widened beyond capital cases. Stevenson described its aims as helping people on death row, challenging the death penalty and prison conditions, freeing people wrongly convicted, ending unfair sentences and racial bias in criminal justice, improving indigent defense, assisting people with mental illness, and keeping children out of adult jails and prisons. EJI also sought to confront poverty and hopelessness in poor communities and to increase diversity in positions of decision-making within the justice system. These were connected objectives rather than separate projects: the organization’s casework repeatedly brought it into contact with people whose vulnerability involved age, disability, poverty, race, or inadequate legal representation at once.

That breadth is visible in its work with children sentenced to die in prison. When Stevenson met Trina Garnett, Ian Manuel, and Antonio Nuñez years after their confinement began, he found them living with the effects of long sentences in adult prisons, dangerous conditions, little family support, and relative public anonymity. EJI agreed to represent them, and challenges to extreme sentences imposed on children became a major focus of its work. Trina’s history illustrates how the organization’s concern extended beyond the sentence itself: she came from impoverished Chester, Pennsylvania, where nearly 46 percent of children lived below the federal poverty level, and after the deaths of boys in her care she was so traumatized that her appointed lawyer thought she might be incompetent to stand trial. The lawyer failed to pursue the necessary motions and evidence, and Trina was tried as an adult. EJI’s later representation addressed a punishment produced in the context of those earlier failures.

EJI’s casework also reached incarcerated women and the conditions they faced. The organization met Marsha Colbey after her arrest for capital murder, a few weeks after she had delivered a stillborn son, and began working on her appeal. Charlotte Morrison and staff attorney Kristen Nelson met repeatedly with Colbey to discuss her case, the strain of trying to keep her family together from prison, and other problems. Sexual violence at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women came up particularly often. EJI filed a complaint with the United States Department of Justice and issued public reports that received widespread media attention. The prison appeared on a Mother Jones list of the ten worst prisons in America, the only women’s facility included; legislative hearings and policy changes followed, including a ban on male guards in shower areas and toilets and the appointment of a new warden.

Institutional pressures and organizational growth

The organization’s need to sustain its work remained a recurring challenge. It had never received state support, and when a conservative majority took control of Congress in 1994, federal legal aid for death-row prisoners was quickly eliminated. Most capital representation resource centers around the country were forced to close. EJI scraped together enough private support to continue, while teaching and fundraising responsibilities accumulated alongside Stevenson’s litigation docket. The staff was overextended, but the organization continued assisting death-row clients and expanding its work on excessive punishment and the needs of disabled prisoners and children.

The scale of that effort eventually changed the organization’s capacity. At one point, EJI’s staff had grown to nearly forty people, a development set against the pressure of a large litigation docket and the possibility of exhaustion. The organization began attracting young lawyers from across the country and created a Justice Fellows program for college graduates. A larger staff of skilled lawyers and professionals made it possible to take on the challenges created by a broader docket. The institution’s growth did not remove the strain of the work; it gave the work a wider base of people able to carry it.

EJI also developed practical support for clients whose release would not, by itself, resolve the consequences of decades in prison. Some had spent many years incarcerated, in some cases since childhood, and had few or no support systems to help them re-enter society. The organization created a re-entry program offering services, housing, job training, life skills, counseling, and other assistance needed after release. It told judges and parole boards that it would provide the support its clients required, treating successful return to community life as part of the responsibilities accompanying legal advocacy.

Public education and racial history

EJI’s work expanded from individual cases into efforts to change how the country understands racial history and contemporary injustice. The organization launched a race and poverty initiative that Stevenson had wanted to establish for years. It published racial history calendars for 2013 and 2014, worked with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South, and brought hundreds of high school students to its office for supplemental education and discussions about rights and justice. Its reports and educational materials sought to deepen national discussion of slavery, lynching, and the continuing legacy of racial injustice.

This initiative was closely connected to EJI’s criminal justice work. Stevenson argued that harmful ideas about justice remained entangled with myths of racial difference. In explaining that connection, he identified slavery and the reign of terror that shaped the lives of people of color after Reconstruction’s collapse and through World War II as institutions essential to understanding the nation’s approach to race and justice. Older people in the South sometimes challenged public commentary that treated domestic terrorism as a new phenomenon after the September 11 attacks; their response reflected the distance between a recent national vocabulary and a much longer history of racial violence. EJI’s educational work made that history part of its account of present-day policy rather than a subject isolated from it.

In April 2018, EJI opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was the country’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching. The museum and memorial extended the organization’s work into public history: alongside legal representation and reports, they offered a place for visitors to encounter the relationship between enslavement, racial terror, and mass incarceration.

Continuing work and significance

EJI remains an active legal organization as well as a public-education institution. Bryan Stevenson continues as its executive director, and the organization continues to represent people on death row, children prosecuted as adults, and incarcerated women, men, and children who have been wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. In February 2019, it won a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States banning the execution of condemned people who become incompetent because of dementia or neurological disease. The ruling exemplified the continuing place of litigation within the organization’s larger work: a specific legal victory could set a limit on punishment while leaving the broader questions of incarceration, race, and human dignity in view.

The organization’s identity is also expressed through its attention to the people behind its cases. One client thanked Stevenson and EJI for making positive developments in his life possible and asked for photographs, a small request that conveys a relationship extending beyond legal filings. Stevenson later described encountering stonecatchers who sustained his belief that society could do better for accused, convicted, and condemned people, and for one another. In that sense, EJI’s development—from a self-funded project in a yellow house to an organization combining litigation, re-entry services, education, and memorial work—has not displaced the individual client at the center of its mission. Its continuing work joins representation of particular people to efforts to change the systems and public histories that shape their treatment.