Bryan A. Stevenson (born November 14, 1959) is an American lawyer, social justice activist, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a clinical professor at New York University School of Law. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, Stevenson has challenged biases against the poor and minority in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped reach the United States Supreme Court ruling that prohibits children under 18 years of age until death or life imprisonment without parole. Stevenson has assisted in cases that have saved tens of inmates from the death penalty, advocated the poor, and developed community-based litigation reforms aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice.
He initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which respects the names of each of more than 4,000 African Americans who were hanged in the twelve southern states from 1877 to 1950. He argues that the history of slavery and betrayal has affected the death penalty number high in the South, where it has been applied disproportionately to minorities. A related museum, From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, will offer an interpretation to show the relationship between the post-Reconstruction period from hanging to high-level executions and the detention of colored people in the United States.
Video Bryan Stevenson
Early life and education
Born in 1959, Stevenson grew up in Milton, Delaware, a small rural town located in Southern Delaware. His father, Howard Carlton Stevenson, Sr., grew up in Milton, and his mother, Alice Gertrude (Golden) Stevenson, was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His family had moved to the city of Virginia in Great Migration in the early 20th century. Stevenson has two siblings: Howard's brother, Jr. and Christy's sister. Both parents went back to the northern part of the country to work: Howard, Sr worked at a General Food processing plant as a lab technician. His mother, Alice, was the bookkeeper at Dover Air Force Base and became an equal chance officer. He specifically emphasized the importance of education.
The Stevenson family attended the African Episcopal Methodist Church, where when a young man, Stevenson, played the piano and sang in the choir. His views were then influenced by the strong faith of the African Episcopal Methodist Church, where the church attendees were celebrated for 'standing after the fall.' This experience confirms his belief that "everyone in our society is more than the worst they've ever done."
When Stevenson was sixteen, his maternal grandfather, Clarence L. Golden, was stabbed to death at his home in Philadelphia during the robbery. The killers received a life sentence, a result that Stevenson thought was fair. Stevenson said of the murder: "Because my grandfather is older, his murder seems very cruel, but I come from a world where we value redemption for vengeance."
As a child, Stevenson deals with segregation and inheritance. He spent his first years in elementary school "color". By the time he entered the second grade, his school was officially separated, but the old rules of segregation were still applied. Black children play separately from white children, and in doctors 'or dentists' offices, black children and their parents continue to use the back door, whilst the white man enters through the front. Pools and other community facilities are informally separated. Stevenson's father, who grew up in the area, took a deeply rooted racism, but their mother noted that this was not true.
Stevenson studied at Cape Henlopen High School and graduated in 1977. He played on soccer and baseball teams. He also served as president of the student body and won the American Legion's public speech contest. His brother, Howard, took some praise for helping to hone Stevenson's rhetorical skills: "We argue with the way the brothers argue, but this is a serious argument, inspired by my mother and the circumstances of our growing family." Stevenson earned an A and won a scholarship to Eastern University at St. Davids, Pennsylvania. On campus, he leads the choir of the campus church. Stevenson graduated in 1981.
Stevenson received a full scholarship to attend Harvard Law School. During law school, as part of a class on race and poverty litigation with Elizabeth Bartholet, she worked for South Stephen Bright's Center for Human Rights. It represents death penalty inmates throughout the South. During this work, Stevenson found his career calling. While at Harvard, he also obtained a Master of Public Policy at John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Maps Bryan Stevenson
Careers
South Human Rights Center
After graduating from Harvard in 1985, Stevenson moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and joined the South Center for Human Rights on a full-time basis. The center is divided work by region and Stevenson is assigned to Alabama. In 1989 he was appointed to run Alabama's operations, resource center and conglomerate-funded defense organization. He has a center in Montgomery, the state capital.
Equal Justice Initiative
When the United States Congress abolished funds for the defense of the death penalty for lower-income people after the Republican Party took control in the 1994 mid-term elections, Stevenson changed the center and founded the Non-Profit Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery. In 1995, he was awarded a MacArthur grant and saved all the money to support the center. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama who has been sentenced to death, because it is the only country that does not provide legal aid to those convicted in death. It also has the highest per capita criminal per capita penalty rate.
Bryan Stevenson has been deeply concerned about the harsh punishment of people convicted of crimes committed as children, under the age of 18. The US Supreme Court ruled at Roper v. Simmons (2005) that the death penalty is unconstitutional for a person convicted of a crime committed under the age of 18 years. Stevenson works to have a court of law thinking about an extensible punishment extending to related cases applicable to children sentenced under the age of 17.
EJI is stepping up litigation campaigns to get a review of cases in which child convicts are sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, including in cases without murder. In Miller v. Alabama (2012), the US Supreme Court ruled in a crucial decision that the compulsory life sentence without parole for children aged 17 years and under is unconstitutional; their decisions have influenced laws in 29 states. In 2016, the court ruled at Montgomery v. Louisiana that this decision should be applied retroactively, potentially affecting the punishment of 2300 people across the country who have been sentenced to life imprisonment while still a child.
Until August 2016, EJI has saved 125 people from the death penalty. In addition, he has represented the poor, defended people in appeals and abrogated false beliefs, and worked to reduce bias in the criminal justice system.
Recognizing slavery
EJI offices are close to landing on the Alabama River where slaves are demoted in domestic slave trade; the same distance is Court Square, "one of the largest slave auction sites in the country." Stevenson has noted that in downtown Montgomery, there are "dozens" of historical markers and many monuments relating to Confederate history, but no one recognizes the history of slavery, where the South's wealth is based and for that he fought against the Civil War. He proposed to the state and provided documentation to recognize three sites of slavery with historic markers; The Alabama Department of Archives and History told him that he did not want to "sponsor a marker given the potential for controversy." Stevenson worked with African-American history groups to get sponsorship for this project; they obtained state approval for three markers by 2013, and this has been installed in Montgomery.
Memorial for Peace and Justice
Stevenson acquired six hectares of public housing land in Montgomery for the development of a new project, the "National Memorial for Peace and Justice", to commemorate nearly 4,000 people who were hung in the South from 1877 to 1950. Many hangings were held openly in front of the crowd and crowds in the square. alun county courthouse. Stevenson argues that the history of extra-judicial mass-tearing by the white masses is closely related to the high rate of death sentences imposed in Alabama and other southern states, as well as its disproportionate application to minorities. He further argues that this history affects the bias against minorities as expressed in a disproportionate level of mass imprisonment for them across the country. Warning opened in April 2018.
He also works to create related museums, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which opened in April. Exhibitions in ex-warehouses of slaves include materials about the death penalty without trial, racial segregation, and mass detention since the end of the 20th century. Stevenson believes that the treatment of colored people under the criminal justice system is linked to the history of slavery and then the treatment of minorities in the South.
Author
Stevenson wrote a critically acclaimed memoir Mercy Only: A Story of Justice and Redemption, published in 2014 by Spiegel & amp; Grau. This was selected by the Time magazine as one of the "10 Best Nonfiction Books" for 2014, and was included among New York Times "100 Important Books" for this year. He won the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2015 Dayton Dayton Peace Noble Prize for Nonfiction.
Speaker
Stevenson conducts an active public speaking schedule, mostly for fundraising for EJI work. His speech at TED2012 in Long Beach, California gave him a vast audience on the Internet. After his presentation, conference participants contributed more than $ 1 million to finance a campaign run by Stevenson to end the practice of placing convicted children to serve sentences in prisons and adult prisons. The conversation is available at "We need to talk about injustice" on the TED website; in August 2016 has been seen by more than 3 million people.
Stevenson has been an early speaker and received various honorary degrees, including from the following institutions: University of Delaware, 2016, Doctorate of Law of honor; Williams College, 2016, honorary doctorate; Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, 2011, Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa; College of the Holy Cross, 2015; Wesleyan University, 2016, honorary degree; University of Mississippi, autumn 2017s fall; Northeastern University, autumn 2017 meeting.
In June 2017, Stevenson delivered the 93rd University Lecture at the Universal Unitarian Unitist Assembly in New Orleans, Louisiana, joining the ranks of previous lecturers including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kurt Vonnegut.
Stevenson is featured in episode 45 of the podcast Criminal by Radiotopia from PRX. The host Phoebe Judge talks with Stevenson about his 30 years of experience he spent working to free people from the death penalty, and about his decision to gain mercy.
Awards
- 1995 MacArthur Fellow
- 2000 Olof Palme Prize
- Gruber 2009 Prize for Justice
- Four Freedom Awards 2011
- Andrew Carnegie 2014 Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction
- Dayton 2015 Literature Peace Prize for Nonfiction
- 2017 Stowe Prize for Writing to Increase Social Justice
Publications
By Bryan Stevenson:
- "Facing Mass Imprisonment and Restoring Justice for Review of Criminal Cases," 41 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 339 (2006)
- "Highest Authority on the Last Penalty: The Important Role of a Jury in Capital Punishment," 54 Ala. L. Rev. 1091 (2003)
- "Fear and Death Politics: Consecutive Issues in the Federal Federal Case of Habeas Corpus," 77 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 699 (2002)
- "Mercy Only: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) ISBN 978-0-8129-9452-0
By EJI:
- "Cruel and Unusual: Punishing Ages 13 and 14 Years to Die in Prison" (2007)
References
External links
- Bryan Stevenson at TED
- Appearance in C-SPAN
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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