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Given the tone of this year's presidential campaigns, it is perhaps not surprising that Bryan Stevenson, one of the most thoughtful voices working for social justice, has no ambition to seek public office. And as founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a legal defense and social advocacy organization with its headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, he is very clear about why.
Politics (when it functions) is built on efforts to reach compromises that result in incremental amendments. The advantage of the law is that it can take very few lawyers to effect real change. By vigorously defending fundamental rights, Stevenson and his team have won decisive and permanent reversals of policy.
"We ended mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children found guilty of non-homicides," Stevenson says, referring to Miller v. Alabama, a case he won in 2012, "not by persuading 50 legislatures but by persuading nine judges on the U.S. Supreme Court."
In the 1950s, he points out, you could never have desegregated schools in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana through a political campaign. "You had to get the courts to intervene. That's how we protect the most disfavored, the poor, and the vulnerable in our society."
Stevenson also teaches law at NYU, and he dresses like a professor, in stylish blazers and crisp shirts. The most remarkable thing about him may be that he speaks with a lulling calm and reasonable good humor seemingly at all times, swapping what would be understandable fury for implacable logic. Regarding the death penalty, for instance, he says the best way to think about it is to replace the question "Do people deserve to die for crimes they commit?" with "Do we deserve to kill?"
It is a question that has preoccupied the Harvard Law School graduate since 1989, when, all of 29, he started EJI. Back then it had a single mission: to represent people on death row. Stevenson set up shop in Montgomery not just because it was ground zero for the civil rights movement but because Alabama had (and still has) two huge challenges for those who can't afford a lawyer: There are no public defenders, and state appointed counsel gets a maximum of $1,000.
"Our legal system treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent," Stevenson asserts. "And we're not talking about how that threatens the integrity of our system."
Supported solely by grants and donations (and that minimal state compensation), EJI has, to date, won reversal or release for 115 people on death row, a record of success that has attracted a new generation of committed defense lawyers from top schools like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Stanford.
Success has also allowed EJI's original mission to grow—first to include litigation in defense of children, the disabled, and the mentally ill and then to extend to policy research on race, poverty, and mass incarceration. "As our work expanded, it became important to remain in the Deep South," Stevenson says, "in proximity to the places where these issues are so raw and so critical."
Stevenson has won a MacArthur grant and the Olof Palme International Prize, and EJI research papers on lynching and the slave trade have hit the front page of the New York Times, providing careful documentation of previously unrecorded atrocities in the belief that "reconciliation with our nation's difficult past cannot be achieved without truthfully confronting history."
Stevenson has followed up the reports with more symbolic efforts, such as placing historical markers at former slave markets in downtown Montgomery and collecting soil from lynching sites and storing the samples in jars with the victims' names.
He can summon up a Martin Luther King–esque gift for poetic rhetoric, as when he says (in his book Just Mercy), "We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity."
Like King, Stevenson looks to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for inspiration; he deflects praise for his own efforts by pointing to role models like Rosa Parks, whom he met as a young lawyer. "I have been privileged to meet people who have affirmed the value of doing what's right," he says, "even if it means doing what's hard."
This story originally appeared in the June 2016 issue of Town & Country.
