Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson’s career begins, in the account of his work, with a young law student’s anxious first visit to death row and develops into a sustained effort to defend condemned people, challenge wrongful convictions, and confront racial injustice in American criminal law. A lawyer who came to see proximity to imprisoned people as essential to understanding their humanity, he built the Equal Justice Initiative into a legal and public-education organization working across death-penalty cases, children prosecuted as adults, prison conditions, and unfair sentences.

Identity and Formation

In 1983, Stevenson was twenty-three, a student at Harvard Law School, and an intern in Georgia. He had never entered a maximum-security prison, much less visited death row. Told that he would meet a condemned prisoner without another lawyer accompanying him, he tried to conceal his panic. The encounter placed him in a new relation to law: not as an abstract field of doctrine, but as a set of decisions with immediate consequences for people facing execution.

By the end of the internship, Stevenson was committed to helping the death-row prisoners he had met. Proximity made the humanity of each incarcerated person more urgent to him, and made the question personal as well as professional. Back at law school, he pursued constitutional law, litigation, appellate procedure, federal courts, and post-conviction remedies, while studying the social relations among race, poverty, and power. Work at the Harvard Kennedy School also acquired new significance. Legal study had once seemed disconnected from life; after the prison visits, its doctrines and procedures became tools for understanding and contesting punishment.

Building a Legal Practice

In February 1989, Stevenson and Eva Ansley opened a nonprofit law center in Tuscaloosa to provide free, high-quality legal services to people condemned to death in Alabama. The center’s work proved harder than they had expected, but its central task was clear: represent clients whose cases and lives could not be understood through the trial record alone. Stevenson described trust as necessary both to manage litigation and to build an effective case for mitigation. Repeated visits and ordinary conversation could make it possible for a client to speak about abuse, neglect, or abandonment—experiences that might be painful to disclose but could matter critically at sentencing.

His approach to representation joined legal research to sustained attention to personal history. A lawyer had to uncover what earlier proceedings had missed and help a court understand how a client’s background related to the conduct for which he faced punishment. That method also shaped Stevenson’s encounters with children. When he first visited Charlie, a fourteen-year-old who had killed a man, Stevenson introduced himself as a lawyer who helped people accused of crimes and offered to help. Charlie had no prior juvenile record; he was a small, good student with certificates for perfect attendance. The account also describes the violence in his home: his mother’s boyfriend had repeatedly beaten her badly enough to require medical treatment. The case put the child’s act beside the circumstances surrounding him, rather than allowing the act to erase the rest of his life.

Litigation, Race, and the McMillian Case

Stevenson’s work on Walter McMillian’s case demanded prolonged investigation as well as courtroom advocacy. Michael O’Connor joined the effort, and the two spent days pursuing leads, interviewing dozens of people, and investigating competing theories. Stevenson came to believe that establishing who had actually killed Ronda Morrison would be necessary to secure McMillian’s release. When McMillian’s hearing arrived, the defense was prepared to present Ralph Myers’s new testimony alongside exculpatory material found in police records that had never been disclosed.

The hearing’s setting made the racial and political pressures of the case visible. Stevenson arrived to find a metal detector inside the courtroom entrance and, beyond it, a police officer restraining a large German shepherd. The benches that had held McMillian’s supporters the day before were now mostly occupied by older white spectators supporting the Morrison family and the prosecution. The altered courtroom did not resolve the evidentiary dispute, but it changed the conditions in which the case was heard and sharpened Stevenson’s sense of the forces surrounding it.

The broader legal context included barriers that reached beyond one trial. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite sixteen majority-Black counties. And although the Supreme Court had ruled against racially discriminatory use of peremptory strikes in jury selection, its demanding evidentiary standard had left the practice of striking all or nearly all Black prospective jurors largely unchanged. Stevenson’s appellate advocacy confronted such institutional failures through concrete cases. After his first argument in McMillian’s case, the organization filed nearly two dozen death-penalty appeals. It won four reversals in 1990, four more in 1991, and relief for another eight death-row prisoners by the end of 1992, even as appellate judges complained about having to order new trials or grant relief.

Expanding the Work

Stevenson’s practice extended to cases in which poverty, age, disability, and family violence intersected with severe punishment. The account describes Trina Garnett, the youngest of twelve children in a deeply impoverished part of Chester, Pennsylvania. After the deaths of two boys, she was so traumatized that she could barely speak when arrested. Her appointed lawyer believed she might be incompetent to stand trial, yet failed to present the necessary motions and evidence or to challenge her prosecution as an adult. Trina was consequently tried for second-degree murder in an adult courthouse. The case illustrates the distance between recognizing a young person’s incapacity and securing the legal procedures that recognition should require.

Stevenson also describes how women facing capital charges were often prosecuted in cases involving the deaths of children or abusive partners. Marsha Colbey was arrested for capital murder only weeks after delivering a stillborn son. The child-victim category of Alabama’s capital-murder law had helped send young mothers and juveniles to death row; all five women then on Alabama’s death row had been condemned in cases involving the unexplained deaths of young children or the deaths of abusive spouses or boyfriends. Earlier work with Diane Tucker and Victoria Banks had exposed another danger: Banks, an intellectually disabled Black woman, was accused of killing a newborn despite there being no credible basis for believing she had been pregnant. She and her sister were coerced into pleading guilty to the killing of a child who had never existed.

In Avery Jenkins’s case, Stevenson’s repeated attempts to bring a milkshake into prison became a small, persistent feature of their visits. Jenkins asked at the beginning of each meeting whether Stevenson had brought one; Stevenson kept trying, partly to help him focus on something else. Their legal challenge concerned evidence of Jenkins’s profound mental illness that should have been presented at trial, and the failure of his lawyers to investigate his history or explain how his disabilities bore on criminal responsibility and sentence. The recurring request and the litigation belonged to the same practice: attending to the person in front of him while insisting that the court account for what it had failed to hear.

Public Mission and Continuing Work

The Equal Justice Initiative’s mission broadened beyond death-penalty litigation to include wrongful convictions, excessive sentences, prison conditions, inadequate legal assistance for poor people, the treatment of people with mental illness, and children held in adult jails and prisons. Stevenson also connected criminal-justice reform to the history of race. He argued that slavery and the racial terror that followed the collapse of Reconstruction until World War II remained necessary context for understanding American ideas about race and justice. In speaking with Rosa Parks, Johnnie Carr, and Virginia Durr, he set out the organization’s ambitions across those linked concerns, including confronting police and prosecutorial abuses of power and educating the public about racial history.

The expanded docket was accompanied by a larger staff. Young lawyers arrived from across the country, and the organization established a Justice Fellows program for college graduates. Stevenson found this growth encouraging because skilled colleagues made the new challenges seem possible. The widening of the work did not displace individual representation: he continued to represent people on death row, children prosecuted as adults, and incarcerated women, men, and children who had been wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.

The work also brought exhaustion. After a night phone call, Stevenson looked across an office crowded with records and papers, each pile holding a tragic story, and felt that he could no longer bear to be surrounded by so much anguish. His crisis does not end in a claim that the suffering had been repaired. Instead, he recognized his own brokenness as part of the reason he continued: “I do what I do because I’m broken, too.” In February 2019, the organization won a landmark ruling from the United States Supreme Court barring the execution of condemned people who become incompetent because of dementia or neurological disease. Stevenson remained the Equal Justice Initiative’s executive director, continuing the work that had begun with a frightened young intern entering a prison and learning that effective advocacy required both legal skill and human closeness.