Activist spotlight: Bryan Stevenson, a beacon of justice and freedom
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama dedicated to “eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults.”
In 2012, Stevenson won a case at the United States Supreme Court that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for children 17 and younger. He won another case in 2019 at the United States Supreme Court that protects condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia.
Stevenson and his team have won reversals, relief or release for over 153 wrongly convicted individuals on and off death row.
The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both located in central Alabama in or near Montgomery, “chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.” He is also a professor of law at the New York University School of Law.
Stevenson has won over 25 awards and 40 honorary doctoral degrees from prestigious colleges like Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
His critically acclaimed New York Times Bestseller, Just Mercy, has been awarded several times including the “American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal for best nonfiction book of 2015 and a 2015 NAACP Image Award.”
The film adaptation of the same name starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, and Brie Larson came out on Christmas of 2019. It is currently available with premium subscriptions to HBO Max, Hulu and Amazon Prime.
