Bryan Stevenson

Stevenson grew up in a rural community in Delaware. His grandmother, with whom he was very close, was the daughter of slaves in Virginia. Stevenson’s father worked in a processing plant and his mother worked a civilian job at an air force base. His family were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sang and played piano and his mother directed the choir. Stevenson majored in philosophy at Eastern University and he went onto study at Harvard Law in a joint program with the Kennedy School of Public Policy. While interning one summer at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (Now the Southern Center for Human Rights) he developed a passion for prison justice and for fighting against the death penalty. In 1985, he moved to Atlanta to work for the SPDC. To meet growing demand for legal aid to death row inmates in Alabama, Stevenson and his friend Eva Ansley moved to Montgomery to start the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 1989. For decades, EJI has defended inmates on death row, challenged inhumane prison conditions, and fought for improvement of the juvenile justice system. Stevenson has argued before the Supreme Court in several cases, including in the high profile 2012 case Miller vs. Alabama, in which the Court banned life sentences for juvenile offenders. With the support of EJI, Stevenson has blocked the executions of over 100 death row inmates. He has traveled throughout the country and around the world to speak about the American criminal justice system, prison justice, the death penalty, and racial and economic equality.