Due to a technical error, the print version of this story omitted a brief part of this interview. The full, unabridged text of the interview can be found below.
Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.
So wrote Bryan Stevenson in a signature passage from his bestselling memoir Just Mercy. Published last year, the book — subtitled A Story of Justice and Redemption— recounts Stevenson’s poor childhood in a racially segregated community in Delaware, his college years and postgraduate degrees from Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and his decision to dedicate his legal career to representing poor people and advocating for systemic reforms, especially in the area of criminal justice. In its review of the book, The New York Times said that Just Mercy “aggregates and personalizes the struggle against injustice in the story of one activist lawyer.”
The vehicle for Stevenson’s life’s work has been the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization he co-founded in 1989. Stevenson, 55, remains the executive director of the Montgomery-based organization and also is a professor at the New York University School of Law. EJI litigates on behalf of indigent defendants and prisoners who have not received fair treatment in the justice system, with a special concentration on cases that involve racial bias or misconduct by prosecutors or judges.
“In Alabama and across the nation, we’re spending a lot of money to keep people who are not a threat to public safety in jail for decades,” Stevenson said last week during a telephone conversation with Weld publisher Mark Kelly (excerpts from that conversation appear below).
Increasingly draconian sentencing laws; the latitude given to prosecutors and judges at the expense of defendants’ rights to a fair trial and the discretion of the jury system; the incidence of wrongful arrests and convictions; the increasing transformation of penal systems from state-run institutions to privately-operated, profit-making enterprises; and the prohibitive (to poor defendants) costs of mounting a winning defense against criminal charges — Stevenson said these factors combine with ingrained racial bias in the criminal justice system to perpetuate poverty and inequality in American life in general.
“Poor people are routinely denied effective legal representation,” Stevenson said. “As a result, there are so many who are charged and convicted wrongly. Poverty marginalizes people. Add unequal treatment to that, and people can become discouraged and begin to lose hope that their lives can be better.”
The Equal Justice Initiative’s highest profile work over the years has been its efforts to exonerate, or win new trials or reduced sentences for, condemned prisoners. Most recently, Stevenson and EJI won the release of Anthony Ray Hinton, whom the U.S. Supreme ruled was convicted of a 1985 double murder in Birmingham on insufficient evidence and as the result of inadequate representation. Ordered to grant Hinton — who had no prior criminal history at the time of his arrest for murder — a new trial, prosecutors chose instead to drop the charges, and he walked free after 30 years on Alabama’s Death Row.
EJI worked on the Hinton case for 15 years, being rebuffed repeatedly in their attempts to persuade local and state officials — including former, longtime Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber and Alabama Attorneys General Troy King and Luther Strange — to reopen the case. In a statement after the announcement of Hinton’s release, Stevenson said that the difficulties of winning exoneration for Hinton underscored the flaws in a desperately broken system.
“Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,” Stevenson said. “I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform.”
Achieving those reforms will require a seismic shift in the way Americans think about the criminal justice system, Stevenson believes. In Just Mercy, he wrote of the “collateral consequences of mass incarceration,” such as the economic, cultural and political ripple effects of policies like those that ban poor women with prior drug convictions — along with their children — from receiving food stamps or living in public housing, or that permanently bar people with criminal convictions from voting. As his title suggests, Stevenson advocates an approach that emphasizes humanity, compassion and mercy.
Stevenson has been nationally known since 1993, when he helped exonerate another Alabama Death Row inmate, Walter McMillan, for his conviction in a murder that happened six years before. He has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including a prestigious fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and his work has achieved national and international acclaim.
In April of this year, Stevenson appeared on Time magazine’s annual list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” The accompanying profile praised him for approaching his work with “the perfect combination of unwavering passion and idealism,” and for his advancement of the idea that “forgiveness is a necessary means to achieving equality for all.”
Stevenson spoke to Weld from his Montgomery office on June 11.
Weld: It seems obvious that poverty, our inability or unwillingness as a state to help people get themselves out of poverty, is at the root of virtually every problem we have in Alabama. Why haven’t we been able to focus public resources on the places where the most need exists? What keeps Alabama poor?
Stevenson: I think we have to understand and acknowledge that the poverty we are dealing with is structural. Alabama has a long history of empowering the few, and taking advantage of the many. To name just one thing, our tax code is designed to protect the people with the most wealth.
That structure has never really been challenged in Alabama. We had slavery, followed by the abandonment of the agricultural class, followed by Jim Crow and segregation, followed by the inability to recruit the kind of jobs that generate wealth, increase incomes, and create the kind of opportunities that lift people out of poverty.
Look at the Black Belt counties where mostly white landowners kept out new business for years, just because they didn’t want to compete for cheap labor. That’s why the efforts to bring those long-term job-creating sectors to the state are 50 years behind. These things aren’t unique to Alabama, but they certainly are particularly problematic here.
Weld: What do we do about it? What are the broad strokes?
Stevenson: Alabama needs a new constitution, fairer tax laws and more investment in education. Our leaders just need to be more attentive to the entire population. Positions of leadership come with moral obligations, and many of those obligations are not being fulfilled.
Weld: But your view is that we really can’t progress fully in those areas without acknowledging the prevalence of racial prejudice, as perpetuated through structures and institutions that have not changed appreciably in over a century.
Stevenson: One reason we are where we are in Alabama is because we haven’t done enough to recover from our history of exclusion. After slavery ended, there was a 100-year period where we continued to provide nothing to balance the scales, and to deny rights to an entire race of people, including the right to vote.
Some things are economic; some are political and cultural. I think about when I travel around the state, and see our landscape littered with monuments and markers of the Confederacy. There’s this mentality of “just be proud,” rather than focus on the narrative of racial exclusion and the need to disclaim that part of our history. Why not tell the whole story?
It’s all how you answer that cultural challenge. Look at South Africa and Rwanda, where you have truth and reconciliation commissions. If you’re in Germany, you are forced to confront and reflect on the history of the Holocaust. In Alabama, we sort of do the opposite of that. Even to the extent that we memorialize the Civil Rights Movement, it happens through this idea of Civil Rights tourism, where we emphasize only those aspects of the narrative that we agree we can feel good about.
Weld: How does all of that factor into economic development, trying to attract good jobs and companies that do progressive things in the communities where they operate? In Alabama, we recruit new industry by offering massive tax breaks, with our leaders arguing that they “pay for themselves” through job creation and other economic impacts gained by the presence of a given company. Is that a sound strategy for attracting the kind of jobs we really need in Alabama?
Stevenson: I think there are some real concerns about that approach. If we were investing in education, development of technical skills, public transportation — things to help people who have been poor for generations to obtain access to the means of alleviating their poverty, I’d feel better about it. I’d say that having a workforce that is educated, trained, motivated and prepared to work is an even better inducement [than tax breaks] to outside investors.
Giving away tax revenues based on the promise of jobs does nothing to change the structures and conditions that perpetuate poverty, and also make it difficult to attract the kinds of jobs that build prosperity over the long term. I’m not seeing any significant trickling down or diversification of these investments. And there are numerous instances of companies coming to Alabama, and then later complaining about impediments to their further development here.
Weld: So what is the role of the business community in removing some of those impediments?
Stevenson: Everybody has a role, and I think you have to give credit to the business community for things that they have done right. The Alabama Constitution still has a prohibition against black and white children attending school together. And I think it’s notable that it has been the business community that has urged the Legislature to take steps to get that language out of there, because they have recognized how that affects the way the state is viewed by major companies that are looking for new locations. Two times, the Legislature has called a referendum, but it failed both times — which also damaged Alabama’s reputation, because here’s a majority of voters who are opposed to changing racist language.
Weld: How does that cultural bent toward racial bias play out in the justice system?
Stevenson: There are 19 appellate court judges in Alabama. All of them are elected, and all of them are white. That is a sign of too little progress. The judiciary plays a critical role in cultivating an environment for ending poverty and creating opportunity.
Again, it’s not unique to Alabama. A lot of the country is bogged down in the politics of fear and anger. In Alabama, we’re passing amendments and legislation that basically assert our willingness to defy federal laws. What is the impact of that on the people of Alabama and their well being?
Weld: As we speak, I’m looking at the front page of the current [June 11-18] issue of our newspaper. It says that, per capita, Alabama has more inmates on Death Row than any state, and asks the question, How did we get here? Well, how did we get here?
Stevenson: We live in a state that has no public defender, and that does not provide legal counsel to assist Death Row inmates. Alabama is the only state that empowers elected judges to override jury verdicts for life sentences and impose the death penalty [note: according to EJI, 20 percent of Alabama’s Death Row inmates are there because of jury-decided life sentences overridden by the trial judge]. We have empowered local prosecutors to seek the death penalty, and they are not exercising a lot of discretion or restraint.
These things, too, are political. But it also gets back to history we have not confronted, in this case our way of using the criminal justice system, historically and in the present. Right now, 80 percent of inmates on Death Row are there for cases where the victims were white. But we know that 65 percent of murder victims in Alabama are black.
Weld: At the very least, that suggests a pretty striking imbalance in the way the law is applied and death penalty convictions pursued.
Stevenson: Too many people are comfortable risking the execution of an innocent person just so they can say that they’re tough on crime. That’s a problem, but I do think that juries are becoming more skeptical, looking more critically at cases where the death penalty is being sought. And you have a state like Nebraska, a conservative state that has abolished capital punishment. We’re starting to ask a different question. It’s not, ‘Does a person deserve to die for the crime they committed?’ but ‘Do we have a right to kill this person?’”
Weld: Does that mean things are moving forward? How do you feel about the future?
Stevenson: I’m a cautious optimist. I believe that we can do better and that progress requires work and struggle. It requires people believing in things they haven’t seen yet. More justice, more hope, more mercy. The possibility for equality.
I can see us getting there. I am persuaded, as Dr. King said, that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
So the work goes on. We’re doing more than we’ve ever done. We are making progress in some sectors. I’m quite energized about what we can do to alleviate poverty and engage people who have been marginalized for so long in opportunities to improve their lives.
The work goes on.