Featuring Bryan Stevenson, Founder/Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative
Bryan Stevenson has become a national and international civil rights leader for the modern era. As the Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, he has led and won major legal challenges in the criminal justice system including against excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of incarcerated and mentally ill individuals, and protecting child prosecuted as adults.
His journey to civil rights leader started when he was a student at Harvard Law School. He had the opportunity to serve in the death row prisoners in the deep South. His remarkable personal and professional experiences representing these individual and facing discrimination first hand is detailed in his book Just Mercy. Just Mercy is a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, than was selected by Time Magazine as of the 10 best nonfiction books of 2014. The book also became a major motion picture by the same title.
Bryan’s accomplishments in civil rights extend across many cases and many human rights issues. He has argued and won multiple cases the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and the landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment without parole for children 17 and younger. He and his staff at EJI have won reversals in more than 135 cases of those prisoners wrongly condemned to death row.
In addition to his legal work, Bryan has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination initiatives, including leading in the creation of the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Bryan also serves as a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. He has been recognized for his teaching by receiving the Distinguished Teaching Award at NYU. He also received 40 honorary doctoral degrees including from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Oxford University.
For his range of achievements, Bryan has been recognized with many awards, including the prestigious MacArther Foundation “Genius” Prize, the American Bar Association Medal; the National Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Interest Lawyer of the Year, and several human rights recognitions. He also was named as Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015 as well as Fortune Magazine’s 2016 and 2017 list of World’s Greatest Leaders. In 2018 he als received the Martin Luther King Nonviolent Peach Prize.
All of his accolades and recognitions stem from his lifelong commitment and sacrifice to bring justice not only into the criminal justice system but into our modern society as a whole.