Cited as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for 2015, attorney Bryan Stevenson has a simple message: Sentencing laws in the United Sates are patently unfair.
In 1989 the New York University professor and public interest lawyer founded the Equal Justice Initiative to combat that lack of empathetic treatment, a mission he’s expected to address head on when he talks at 7 p.m. today at the season’s first Authors! Authors! lecture at the McMaster Center at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library.
The event is sold out.
Stevenson first gained fame after giving a 2012 Ted talk in Long Beach, Calif., where he noted: “For every nine people who have been executed [in America], we’ve actually identified one innocent person who’s been exonerated and released from death row.”
That talk has been viewed online more than 2 million times, and helped him raise $1 million for a campaign to end putting children in jail and prison.
Time recognized Stevenson for his beliefs that “every person is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done,” and that “forgiveness is a necessary means to achieving equality for all.”
“When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise,” Stevenson wrote in his 2014 bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. “You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
“The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
Among his other achievements, the Harvard Law School graduate won a 2012 case before the U.S. Supreme Court holding that it’s unconstitutional to sentence children under 17 to life in prison without parole if they haven’t committed murder.
Beyond trying to change unfair sentencing laws, the Equal Justice Initiative works to exonerate innocent prisoners on death row and expose abuse of the incarcerated mentally ill. His group has also issued a report documenting the lynching of at least 700 previously unknown victims in the Jim Crow South.
The great grandson of a Virginia slave, Stevenson grew up in poverty in southern Delaware before putting himself through Eastern University and later law school.
He discovered what would become his life mission as a college law intern while visiting a death row inmate in Georgia.
In surveying those locked up in American prison, he’s argued that race plays a bigger role in who goes to jail in this country than economic disadvantage.
“I’m not persuaded that the opposite of poverty is wealth — I’ve come to believe ... that the opposite of poverty is justice,” he said during a 2014 interview on National Public Radio.
The recipient of more than 20 honorary degrees, Stevenson received a McArthur “Genius Grant” in 1995.
Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the ACLU National Medal of Liberty and, in 2004, the Olaf Palme Prize for international human rights in Stockholm.
While Bryan Stevenson’s critics have branded him an idealist, England’s The Guardian described him as the “American Mandela.”
Added South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a Vanity Fair article last May: “Justice needs champions, and Bryan Stevenson is such a champion.”
Contact Mike Pearson at mpearson@theblade.com or 419-724-6159.
First Published September 29, 2015, 4:00 a.m.