Bryan Stevenson has spent four decades doing what many lawyers claim they want to do, but few actually commit to doing: fighting for the powerless.
As founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a state with the highest per capita rate of death penalty sentencing, Stevenson has dedicated his career to challenging mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial injustice in the American legal system.
Few can match the number of US Supreme Court victories Stevenson has secured, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia, and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Stevenson and the staff of EJI have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row, and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. His work has literally saved lives.
Stevenson's representation of Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongly convicted of murder in Alabama and sentenced to death, became the subject of his bestselling memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, and its subsequent film adaptation. The case exemplified everything wrong with the American criminal justice system: racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense counsel, and a community willing to believe the worst. Stevenson spent years dismantling the case against McMillian, ultimately winning his freedom after six years on death row.
What makes Stevenson a lawyer with mojo is not just his impressive win record, but his unwavering moral clarity about what the law should accomplish. He sees legal practice as a tool for human dignity.
Bryan Stevenson reminds us why so many seek the law as a profession: to stand between the powerful and the powerless, and to bend the arc of law towards justice. As Stevenson himself puts it: "The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned."
