Bryan Stevenson talking:
I think Ferguson should be seen as a mirror for all of America. In every community in this country, we have black and brown people who are being presumed dangerous and guilty. And it’s following them into schools, where they suffer higher suspension and expulsion rates. It follows them into department stores. It follows them into the streets. And that burden of being presumed dangerous and guilty is extremely frustrating and angering. And when you have incidents like Michael Brown being shot by an officer, that blows up.
And we need to keep careful attention to what’s going on in Ferguson, but we need to understand that in every community in this country where there are young black and brown men and women, that phenomenon, that problem, exists. And we are not going to deal with this issue if we just think whether this officer is indicted or prosecuted or not tells us something. We’ve got to really begin talking honestly about the legacy of racial inequality in this country and what it’s done to all of us.
The crisis, for them, really isn’t what’s happening with this officer. What the crisis is, is that people are actually exposing all of this bias and all of this tension and all of this frustration. And it’s, I think, really quite misguided. It’s going to create more problems than it solves. He’s baiting the community by engaging in these kind of tactics. And I just wish he was talking to people who understood the pain and anguish of people in Ferguson, the pain and anguish of people of color in many parts of this country, because if he did, he’d actually be saying things differently. They’d be doing things differently. And I think we would have much less violence and conflict and tension. But because he’s talking to the same people who are in that bunker-down mentality, you see them repeating the mistakes that took place immediately after the shooting—taking this very militarized approach, gearing up, gunning up. And I think it’s a very misguided, very misguided approach to this issue.
We have so many people in this country that live in the margins of society, that live in jails and prisons, that live with disability, that live outside of the American experience in the way that most people think about it. And we sometimes throw things at them to make ourselves feel better about their existence, their reality, when, in fact, I really believe that poverty in this country is a function of our unwillingness to do justice to many parts of our community. And I really do believe that the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. I think, you know, we have this arrogance. We think that when we make a mistake, we don’t ever have to apologize, we don’t actually have to rethink how we’ve behaved; we can just throw some money or throw some policy out there and move forward. I don’t believe that gets you closer to deconstructing poverty.
We haven’t created an environment where people of color can be fully protected, because we haven’t talked about what it means to be a person of color in this country. I think, you know, we’ve never really told the truth about some basic realities.
The legacy—you know, we’re doing a whole project on slavery, because I don’t think we’ve ever told the truth about what slavery did to our thinking about racial difference. We told lies about people of color. We said that people of African descent aren’t smart, aren’t hard-working, aren’t capable, and because of that, we should enslave them. And because we never confronted that, slavery didn’t end, it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial terror, where we use violence and lynching and convict leasing and threats to sustain racial hierarchy. That’s our history up until the era of Jim Crow and segregation. And then we codified these differences between the races. And even after the civil rights movement, we never told the truth about all of the damage we did. We humiliated people of color on a daily basis for decades. My parents were humiliated every day of their life. I started my education in a colored school, because I was told I wasn’t smart enough to go to the public school. Those things accumulate. And because we haven’t dealt with it, we now live in an era of mass incarceration, where we intimidate and threaten and harass and menace people of color. And these—everybody feels it.
And so, we shouldn’t be surprised if you don’t get justice. What we should do is start talking about truth. And we’ve got to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. And I hope, without an indictment, we’ll be more committed to telling the truth about our history and creating a new forward path.
I grew up in southern Delaware, the kind of the top of the South, on the Eastern Shore, in a community that was very much segregated. There were no black high schools in my county. My dad couldn’t go to high school there. And I saw people really branded by the mark of Jim Crow and of apartheid. And you can’t recover—and white people, too. We have a whole generation of white people who were taught that they’re better than other people because of their race. And we haven’t helped them recover from that, and they’re manifesting this bias in ways that they’re not even conscious of sometimes. We’ve got a lot of work to do in this country to confront our history of racial inequality.
Walter McMillian was one of the characters, one of the people I wrote about in this book, was an innocent man wrongly convicted of a murder in Monroeville, Alabama. At the time, there was a young woman murdered in downtown Monroeville. Mr. McMillian was actually at his home with about 25 other African Americans raising money for his church, and so everybody knew he was innocent. But he was charged because he was having an interracial affair, not because he had a prior criminal history. He was put on death row for 15 months—before the trial. He was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. What was really troubling for me is that this case took place in Monroeville, which is where Harper Lee grew up and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. So it’s a community that completely identifies with that story, but couldn’t recognize the injustice of this wrongful conviction of an African American.
I want to do better than Atticus Finch. Atticus Finch’s client, Tom Robinson, dies in prison because there was no hope for him. I want our clients, I want people wrongly convicted and accused, to get relief. I want the people in jails and prisons all across this country who are there unfairly, unnecessarily, released. I want to do more than what happens to that client in To Kill a Mockingbird.
we ultimately were able to present evidence of his innocence. The police had coerced witnesses to testify falsely against him. And for some bizarre reason, they actually tape-recorded the sessions where they were coercing the witnesses to testify falsely. So we got the tapes. And the witness was saying, “You want me to frame an innocent man for murder, and I don’t feel right about that.” And we presented that evidence and ultimately won Mr. McMillian’s release. He’s one of about 150 people on death row who’ve been exonerated in this country. For every 10 executions in America, we’ve identified one innocent person who was innocent and who has now been released. It’s a shameful rate of error when it comes to imposing the death penalty.
I am encouraged by that, but I’m also worried, because these issues are fairly local. Each state gets to make up its own decision. And so, we’ve seen some progress with several states in the last few years abolishing the death penalty. I was especially encouraged by the 2012 referendum in California, where people in that state almost voted to end the death penalty by popular vote, which would really be progress. But I’m worried that our indifference to wrongful conviction, our indifference to suffering of jailed and imprisoned people continues to be very strong. And until we break that indifference, I worry that we’re going to continue to have a country where people are condemned unfairly, sentenced unfairly, tortured in jails and prisons.
I think that we have too little compassion in our criminal justice system. We’ve been corrupted by the politics of fear and anger. We’re doing harsh, extraordinarily torturous things to people. And I think we’ve forgotten that, you know, it’s not mercy, it’s not justice, it’s not compassion, when we give it to people who haven’t done anything wrong. You earn the right to call yourself compassionate and merciful when you expose people who have fallen down, who have done bad things to your justice, to your mercy. And I see a criminal justice system completely devoid of mercy, which makes us completely devoid of justice. And we’ve got to do better.
one of the more tragic things that we’ve done over the last 40 years is that we’ve put thousands of children in the adult prison system, the adult criminal justice system. We’ve now got 250,000 people serving long sentences for crimes they committed as children. We have some 3,000 children sentenced to die in prison, some as young as 13 and 14 years of age. And it’s horrific. You know, I was hearing about the DeFriest story, which is a very compelling story, but there are thousands of children in similar situations. I’ve represented 13-year-olds in the state of Florida who were also put in solitary confinement, some of whom have been there for 18 years. Joe Sullivan was 13, convicted of a non-homicide and sentenced to die in prison.
We’ve won some Supreme Court decisions that have made it easier to challenge some of those sentences, but we still have a lot of work to do. We created these narratives about children where we said some children aren’t really children. And we’ve done some really cruel and torturous things. And it’s shameful to me that the United States and Somalia are the only two countries in the world that have not signed the Covenant on the Rights of the Child, because it protects children from adult prison sentences like life in prison and the death penalty. And one of the great tragedies is when you go to jails and prisons, and you see 13- and 14- and 15-year-old children in settings where they’re being raped and abused because we haven’t confronted the need to protect children after they’ve been accused of a crime.
I write about a young woman named Trina Garnett in Pennsylvania who was horribly abused. Her mother died when she was young. She was living in a house where she was suffering from a lot of violence. She was disabled. She was homeless, living on the streets of Chester, eating out of garbage cans. She met a family. There was a boy in the family, and one night she tries to go and see the boy by breaking in. She drops matches, the house catches on fire, and two children died. She’s convicted of an unintentional murder, but mandatory life without parole. We have these mandatory life sentences that are very common in the adult sentence. So, at the age of 14, she’s condemned to die in prison. She goes to the state prison. She’s raped by a male guard. She gets pregnant. She’s been in prison now for almost 40 years, and that suffering continues.
And there are many children like that who have suffered these horrible injustices because we imposed a mandatory sentence. We would not consider their age at the time of sentencing. And we don’t let kids vote, we don’t let them drink, we don’t let them smoke. We protect child status—except when they’re accused of a crime. And then we say that their child status doesn’t matter. And there’s a whole nation where we have this whole country is now populated by jails and prisons where you find children. There are 15 states with no minimum age for trying a child as an adult. I’ve represented nine- and 10-year-old children threatened with adult prosecution. There’s a 10-year-old facing adult prosecution in Pennsylvania now, a 12-year-old in the state of Florida. It’s really shameful what we’ve done to children in the name of being tough on crime, and I think that disconnect is part of what we’re trying to expose with our litigation.
We have in our prisons about 2.3 million people, half of whom are believed to have mental illness. About 20 percent have severe mental illness. The criminal justice system, the prisons have become the repository for people with disability that have no place else to go. And that is part of the story behind this case.
The other part of the story is that we’ve created a system that is much more concerned about finality than fairness. The reason why no one’s prepared to look carefully at the clear evidence of mental illness that should block the state from carrying out this execution is that we seem like we’re in this rush, that if we don’t execute people fast, it’s almost as if it loses its potency, its value, its virtue. But my view is that if we execute people unfairly or wrongly, then we do a great deal of injustice to our whole system. And so, I think it’s tragic that we get caught up in this finality kind of focus. And you see that playing out in this case.
The Supreme Court has banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, people with mental retardation. And obviously, if you recognize that there are disabilities that can make you someone who should not be executed, you have to look more carefully at a case like this. And I think there are actually hundreds of people who have been sentenced to death when they are clearly very severely mentally ill. And a just society wouldn’t want to execute people for their disability, because that’s cruel. That’s not a decent thing to do. It’s not what a just community should do. But we’re going to do that in Texas, if we don’t take the time to think more carefully about what that case represents.
And too often, unfortunately, we don’t learn the details of these tragedies until very close to the execution time, because it’s very hard to get anyone’s attention in the death penalty space until there’s a crisis, until there’s an execution date. And that undermines the fair consideration that we often need in these cases. And sadly, it doesn’t happen at trial, because we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Wealth prevents many poor people and disabled people from getting their story presented in a way that might allow us to get to a just outcome. And so then we have years of appeals and litigation where maybe that story might unfold, and that’s what you’re seeing in Texas today.
I represent people there, several young clients. We did a case, actually, in St. Louis of a 14-year-old kid who was accused of a murder that he didn’t commit, was sentenced to life without parole. He was tried by an all-white jury after the prosecutor excluded African Americans from serving on the jury. And we ultimately got him released after proving illegal racial discrimination in jury service.
And that’s the other backdrop. If there is no indictment in the Ferguson case, if there is no conviction, it will reveal and reflect on the way in which we select juries in this case—in this country, including in Missouri, where there’s often a great deal of exclusion of people of color, which feeds that distrust of the system. But I’ve seen that up close and personal in cases that I’ve worked on in Missouri.
I grew up in a poor, rural community on the Eastern Shore in southern Delaware, that’s not unlike most Southern communities, where there was segregation. I started my education in the colored school. Black kids couldn’t go to the public schools, even though this was 10 years after Brown. And I saw my parents humiliated on a regular basis by the racial order.
my dad worked at a food factory, and my mother worked at the Air Force base up in Dover. Where the bodies come home, yeah. And my dad did domestic work, cleaning houses down at the beach. But, you know, one of the things that bothers me the way we talk about this history is that we actually celebrate civil rights in this country with great enthusiasm, and everybody gets to celebrate—you don’t have to do anything to kind of establish some qualification to celebrate—and it’s almost as if we are kind of ignoring what’s behind the civil rights movement. We talk about the civil rights experience like it was this three-day moment, where Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat on day one, and Dr. King led a March on Washington on day two, and then we passed all these laws. And now we celebrate—the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. And what we don’t do is talk about all the damage we did by humiliating people of color on a daily basis by subjecting people to this racial subordination, this racial hierarchy, to the distrust we created, to the injuries we imposed on people. And what I see are those injuries expressing themselves. What I see is that burden created. And because of that, I think we’re actually contributing to the legacy of racial inequality, when we just celebrate and don’t tell the truth of all of the damage that was done. I think we need truth and reconciliation in this country. In South Africa, they didn’t get past apartheid without truth and reconciliation.
Rosa Parks was a proud troublemaker, because there needed to be trouble when people of color were being treated the way people of color were being treated. I mean, what people don’t know is that before that moment, she was organizing protests. There was a young African-American man who was executed for a crime that people in Montgomery absolutely insisted that he did not commit. And she was deeply affected by that wrongful execution. It was a young black man who was in a band, who was accused of an assault. They actually arrested him, took him to death row, put him in the electric chair and kept him there until he confessed to the crime.
His name was Jeremiah Reeves. He stayed in that chair until they got that confession. And people in the black community, including Dr. King, were very concerned about organizing about his mistreatment. They could not get the relief, and he was ultimately executed for real. And it was deeply distressing to her.
And she was deeply committed to challenging the status quo. And I got to spend time with her, and she was an amazing person. She was the kind of person who would inspire people. I remember we went down to Tallahassee, Florida, where they were giving her an honorary degree, and they started playing “We Shall Overcome” at the beginning of the ceremony, and people just sat there. And she looked around at everybody, and she said, “Well, I’m used to standing when we sing this song.” She stood up, and for a moment she stood by herself, and then everybody else stood back up. And that was Ms. Parks. She was courageous. She was determined. She was very influential.
You know, I met her for the first time when she came back to be with two of her friends, Johnnie Carr, who was the architect of the Montgomery bus boycott, and a white woman named Virginia Durr, whose husband Clifford Durr represented Dr. King. And I remember being there, and I had been told, “Just sit and listen, Bryan. Don’t say a word.” And I was sitting there listening to her for two hours, and she was so encouraging. At one point she said to me, she said, “Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. Tell me what you’re trying to do.” And I looked at Ms. Carr to to see if I had permission to speak, and she nodded, so I gave her my rap. I said, “We’re trying to do something about the death penalty. We’re trying to do something about mass incarceration and the treatment of the poor and people of color in jails and prisons, and children in poverty.” And I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished, she said, “Mm-mm-mm, that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.” And Ms. Carr leaned forward, and she put her finger up, and she said, “That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.”
Ms. Parks was a courageous woman. What defined her was her bravery, her willingness to take personal challenges, personal risks, to advance the cause of justice. And she’s really, in many ways, not fully credited for being that courageous, tenacious fighter, which I think more accurately characterized her life.
I got to go to high school as a result of lawyers coming into our community and opening up the public schools for me. But for their intervention, I wouldn’t be here today. And when I was in college, I was studying philosophy. I didn’t really know what to do after college and ended up going to law school by default, and was actually quite frustrated because they weren’t talking about poverty and race and justice in my first year of law school.
But then I had an opportunity to work with a human rights group that provided legal services to people on death row, and that, for me, is what changed everything. I met people literally dying for legal assistance on death row in Georgia. And I saw in them humanity and possibility and people struggling for redemption, struggling for recovery. And it was just so impactful that I knew that that’s what I wanted to do, and I went back, and I’ve been standing with the incarcerated and the condemned ever since.
And, you know, for me, it’s been a privilege, because I get to see extraordinary things. We’ve been successful in getting lots of people released, which is wonderful. We haven’t always been successful. I’ve stood next to people before they were executed, and that’s been heartbreaking and devastating. But I’ve never doubted that standing for condemned people, pushing and advocating for people who had been discarded and rejected, makes me feel more human.
the first case was actually the McMillian case. After we got Mr. McMillian released from death row, after he had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, we wanted the state to own up to it. And they weren’t. There were no—there were no statutes providing money for him. They weren’t going to pay him anything. They weren’t going to do anything. And because they had put him on death row for 15 months before the trial, because they actually hid the evidence that would have proved his innocence, we sued them. And there was a question about whether the sheriff, who had done all kinds of horrible things, including threaten him with lynching and violence, could be held accountable. And the case went to the Supreme Court on whether the county was liable for the conduct of this sheriff.
This was in Monroeville, yeah, out of Monroe County, whether that county had some responsibility for what it did to Mr. McMillian. And the first time I went to the Supreme Court is when I started this ritual that I’ve followed every time I stood in front of the court, and I just read where it says on the building, “Equal Justice Under Law.” And I have to believe that in order to make sense of what I do. And we went in there—I went in there and argued that case, and I’ve been back several times since. I sometimes worry that the court doesn’t fulfill that commitment. You know, we’ve done cases where the court has basically accepted evidence of racial bias and said that racial bias is inevitable in the administration of the death penalty. That’s McCleskey, a case that was decided in 1987.
McCleskey was a case where there was evidence presented that the death penalty in Georgia is racially biased. The researchers proved that you’re 11 times more likely to get the death penalty in the state of Georgia if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get the death penalty if the defendant is black and the victim is white. That was presented to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court accepted that evidence, but nonetheless upheld the death penalty by saying, one, if we deal with racial bias in the death penalty, it’s going to be just a matter of time before lawyers start complaining about racial bias in other parts of the criminal justice system. Justice Brennan criticized the court for its, quote, “fear of too much justice,” because in some ways the court was saying, “This problem is too big for us.”
The second thing they said was racial bias in the administration of the death penalty is inevitable. And they use that word, and it’s the reason why I think of that case as our Dred Scott of this generation, our Plessy v. Ferguson. And when I look at “Equal Justice Under the Law” and I read that decision, I realize there’s a disconnect, because you can’t have equal justice under the law while you’re pronouncing that racial bias is inevitable in something like the death penalty. And so, even though I’ve gone to the court, I still expect more from the court on these issues.
Dred Scott is buried just four miles down the road, on West Florissant. we can run from this history of racial inequality, but we cannot hide. It’s ironic that here we are sitting here in 2014 where all of this attention is focused on Missouri—not a Deep South state, but a state where the history of racial inequality played out in very dramatic terms.
People might even be surprised to know Missouri was a slave state. And that’s why the story of Dred Scott, their unwillingness to give up slavery when they wanted it for economic gain, to give up this mythology of demonizing and criminalizing and abusing people of color when it created some gain for them, becomes so important, because that story in Missouri has never really been told the way it needs to be told. Missouri has the same history of racial segregation and slavery and abuse that you find in Alabama and Mississippi. We just don’t talk about it as much. Because we haven’t talked about it, we now have these presumptions of guilt following young men of color in that state, in Ferguson. And so, people in Ferguson aren’t protesting because of one thing that happened to one person. They’re protesting because all their lives they’ve been menaced and traumatized and followed and presumed guilty and dangerous. And that history has never been confronted, because we’ve never held anybody accountable for that history.
And when the Supreme Court in 1987, in a death penalty case, the case where the court says, “This is the system at its best, because we’re imposing these perfect punishments. If we don’t do it right in the death penalty context, we just can’t do it right”—and so they’re presented with this evidence of racial bias, and they’re asked to commit to eliminating racial bias, and they say, “No, racial bias is too pervasive, it’s too insidious, it’s too ever-present for us to take on. We just have to make peace with it.” And the court upholds the death penalty. And now we’ve had all of these executions in a system that is admittedly undermined by racial bias and racial injustice. And so, today, we are talking about racially biased imposition of the death penalty. We’re talking about unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. We’re talking about our failure to confront this history of racial inequality. And until we confront it and deal with it more honestly, we’re going to be having this conversation for another 50 years.
look at the civil rights movement. We’re celebrating, you know, these legal decisions—the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act—but those acts were a response to people protesting. It was when people came back to Selma after the Bloody Sunday, after the first Selma-to-Montgomery March, which led up to the Voting Rights Act, was met with violent resistance, brutal resistance, but thousands of people came back to Selma to say, “No, we have got to do better in this country.” And it was that protest that created the political environment that made the Voting Rights Act possible. But for people out in the streets, you would not have seen the Supreme Court strike down miscegenation laws, which made it illegal in some states for black people and white people to get married, for people of different races to get married. The protests were necessary for that. And we’re going to need communities, people, ordinary people, speaking up and saying things about what is unacceptable about what’s happening in Ferguson, what’s unacceptable about what’s happening in our jails and prisons, to create the right kind of legal environment for the court to do what it must do to protect the rights of disfavored people.
Equal Justice Initiative, We are very determined to change the narrative in this country about racial history. We put out a report last year about slavery. And we actually put up slave markers and monuments in downtown Montgomery, because if you came there a year ago, you’d find 59 markers and monuments relating to the 19th century, markers and monuments to the Confederacy. We celebrate—Jefferson Davis’s birthday is a state holiday. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday. We name our schools after Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. All of this stuff about the Confederacy, not a word about slavery. And so we put out a report about slavery, and we put up these monuments and markers to mark the spots where the slave trade oppressed and enslaved thousands of African Americans. And we want to keep doing that in communities across this country.
Our next report is about lynching, because we have in this country states where African Americans were terrorized. People of color in America dealt with terrorism for a generation, between Reconstruction and World War II. And they, some of them, get angry when they hear people on TV say we’re dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time after 9/11, because they grew up with terror. Lynching was horrific and terrifying. And we don’t talk about it. We put markers about the Confederacy in front of these courthouses, but we don’t say a word about the thousands of people that were lynched, hundreds of whom were lynched on courthouse lawns.
And so, we want to put out a report, and we want to actually confront communities to start dealing with that legacy, dealing with that history. It’s only when we express some shame about our racial violence, our use of violence to intimidate and menace people of color, that we commit ourselves to policing strategies, to contemporary criminal justice strategies, that make the incident in Ferguson less likely to happen. And we won’t get there until we actually create some consciousness about why it’s so important.
Ida B. Wells is, again, someone—you know, if there is someone who should have a national holiday, my recommendation would be Ida Wells, because she forced this country to pay attention to lawlessness. You know, I say this often. You can’t judge America by how wealthy we are, by how successful we are, by our technology. You judge a country, you judge a community, not by how you treat the rich and the powerful and the privileged, you judge a community by how you treat the poor, the incarcerated, the condemned and disfavored. And Ida B. Wells was insisting that America recognize that it is this country that is lynching people based on suspicion.
These lynchings were taking place not even because people were necessarily accused of crimes. We lynched people in America because—African Americans, because they went to the front door rather than the back door, because they laughed at the joke at the wrong time. And that racial oppression, that subordination, was something that she believed had to be exposed, if we were going to really see what kind of country we are.
And she was tormented and traumatized and terrorized herself by talking constantly about what lynching represents in American life. And eventually lynching stopped, but the mindset didn’t. And that’s why we think talking about lynching today is such a critically important issue for Americans and for this country, when it comes to racial justice.
I think the thing that surprised me the most is how much of what’s happened has gone unexamined. You know, most people don’t know that we have a million people in jails and prisons for drug dependency—not because they’ve committed a crime, not because they’ve hurt somebody. I think what’s really troubling to me is that we know so little. Even though we talk so much, we know so little about how we got here. You know, other countries dealt with drug dependency as a health issue. We dealt with it as a crime issue. And we’ve ruined lots of families. I don’t think most people know there are six million people on probation and parole in this country.
It means that their lives are being controlled by the criminal justice system. It means that if they fail to make a monthly payment to the system, which they have to do, to pay their probation fee or their parole fee, they get put back in prison, sometimes for decades. It means that we are keeping them from re-engaging. They can’t get jobs oftentimes. They can’t vote. They can’t do a lot of the things that make it possible for people to have successful lives. We have 60 million people in America with criminal arrests, which means that when they apply for a job, they have to reveal that, and their chance of being hired is dramatically reduced—60 million people.
I think we should do the interview, make an assessment about the person. I think there are some jobs where you can ask whether the person has been formerly incarcerated, but if you do it at the end of the interview, the chance of hiring that person is dramatically higher, because if I talk to you and I think you’re a great TV commentator and host, and I see all the skills that I want to see, and then you tell me at the end of it, “You know, by the way, when I was 20, I did something and went to jail for a short period of time,” I’m not going to let that dissuade me from hiring you, because I know you’re great. If you ask that question first, and I don’t get to see how great you are, how skilled you are, how committed you are, you’re not going to get the job. And so, that’s what we’re asking employers to do and asking companies to commit to, because what we find is that the rates of hiring for formerly incarcerated people go way up when you just do it at the end, if you do it at all.
Thurgood Marshall used to say—”What case are you most proud of?” He said, “The next case.” And I think it’s that way for me. I think—I take great pride in helping anybody that we’ve been able to help. But I think, for me, what I’m most proud of is that we’re still trying. I don’t think we’ve done our best cases yet. I want to believe that we’ve got important work still to do. And what energizes me is knowing that we can keep fighting, that there are challenges that haven’t been fully addressed.
You know, I’ll tell you this story. I was working on a case not too long ago, actually in the Midwest, where I was sitting in the courtroom waiting for the court to start, the hearing to start. I was sitting at defense table.
It was actually in Iowa. And I was sitting there waiting for the hearing to begin, and I was sitting at defense table, and the judge walked in, followed by the prosecutor. And when the judge saw me sitting there, he said, “Hey, hey, hey! You get out of the courtroom. I don’t want any defendants sitting in the courtroom without their lawyers. You go back out there in the hallway and wait until your lawyer gets here.” And I stood up, and I said, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Bryan Stevenson. I am the lawyer.” And the judge looked at me, and the judge started laughing. And the prosecutor started laughing. And I made myself laugh, too, because I didn’t want to disadvantage my client. And then the client came in. It was a young white kid. And we did this hearing. And afterward, I was so exhausted and frustrated.
You know, what makes me proud right now is that we’re doing this race and poverty project, because I don’t think we’re going to confront those kinds of problems. We’re going to have judges exercising judgment and discretion in this way that is so corrupted by bias and bigotry. And we’re not going to do anything about that until we start talking more broadly about this history of racial bias. And so, I’m really excited about that work.
He laughed. We just laughed it off, and we went through the hearing. We did well for that client, I think, because I didn’t turn that into an ugly confrontation. But no, no apologies—much like what we’ve done in this country. We don’t really—we think apologizing disempowers us. I actually think apologizing makes you more human, makes you ultimately healthier, makes you stronger. You know, I go to Germany, and I see what’s going on in that country, and you can’t go many places without confronting the legacy of the Holocaust. It makes me hopeful about the future Germany in ways that I wouldn’t be if I went there and you couldn’t see any evidence that people were talking and thinking about that history. And here we do the opposite. And I think we won’t be strong and healthy until we actually begin to reflect more soberly about what we’ve done to one another in so many of the spaces where we have racial conflict and racial inequality.
— source democracynow.org
Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative. His new book is Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.