Bryan Stevenson is a public interest lawyer, law professor, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative who has spent nearly four decades representing people on death row, children sentenced to life in prison, and people who were wrongly convicted. He has argued five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, won rulings that reshaped how courts sentence juvenile offenders, helped free a wrongly convicted man from Alabama’s death row, and built the first national memorial to victims of lynching in the United States. His memoir, Just Mercy, brought that work to a wider audience and was adapted into a 2019 feature film.
His Work at the Equal Justice Initiative
Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama in 1994, after Congress eliminated federal funding for legal representation in death penalty cases.1Harvard Kennedy School. 2018 Alumni Public Service Award: Bryan Stevenson MPP/JD 1985 EJI is a nonprofit law office that defends people who are poor, incarcerated, or wrongly condemned.2Equal Justice Initiative. Annual Report
The organization investigates cases involving legal errors, racial bias, or prosecutorial misconduct, and has represented hundreds of people on Alabama’s death row. Much of the work is post-conviction appeals in cases where defendants had inadequate legal representation at trial.3Equal Justice Initiative. Profiles in Exoneration
The Supreme Court Rulings He Won
Stevenson has argued five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.4Oyez. Bryan A. Stevenson Several reshaped juvenile sentencing law.
In Miller v. Alabama (2012), he convinced the Court that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of homicide violate the Eighth Amendment.5Oyez. Miller v. Alabama Sentencing schemes cannot automatically impose the harshest punishment on juvenile offenders without weighing their age, maturity, and capacity for change.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 The Court later made that rule retroactive in Montgomery v. Louisiana, allowing people already serving mandatory life sentences imposed as children to seek new hearings.7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Montgomery v. Louisiana, 577 U.S. 190
Stevenson also argued Sullivan v. Florida in 2009 on behalf of a client convicted of a non-homicide offense at age thirteen. The companion case, Graham v. Florida, produced a ruling that sentencing a juvenile to life without parole for a non-homicide crime violates the Eighth Amendment.8Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48
In Madison v. Alabama (2019), he represented a death row prisoner suffering from dementia who could no longer remember the crime for which he was sentenced to die. The Court ruled 5–3 that the Eighth Amendment bars executing a prisoner who cannot rationally understand the reason for the execution, whether the inability stems from psychosis or dementia.9Oyez. Madison v. Alabama
The Walter McMillian Case
Stevenson is widely identified with the case of Walter McMillian, a Black man convicted and sentenced to death for the 1986 murder of a young white woman in Monroeville, Alabama. Stevenson took on the case after McMillian was already on death row and showed that the prosecution’s key witnesses had lied on the stand and that exculpatory evidence had been illegally withheld.10Equal Justice Initiative. Walter McMillian
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction in 1993, a new state investigation confirmed McMillian’s innocence, and prosecutors dropped all charges. McMillian walked out a free man in March 1993.11Justia. McMillian v. State
Just Mercy
Stevenson published his memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, in 2014. The book centers on the McMillian case and weaves in stories of other clients, including children sentenced to die in prison.12Equal Justice Initiative. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption It became a bestseller and was adapted into a 2019 feature film, with Michael B. Jordan playing Stevenson and Jamie Foxx playing McMillian.
The Memorial and Museum in Montgomery
Stevenson has also pushed the country to confront its history of racial violence. EJI spent years documenting racial terror lynchings across the American South, identifying nearly 6,500 between 1865 and 1950. That work led to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in Montgomery on April 26, 2018 as the first memorial in the United States dedicated to the victims of lynching.13The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
EJI also opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, located on the site of a former slave warehouse in Montgomery. The 11,000-square-foot museum traces the line from slavery through racial terror, legal segregation, and mass incarceration.14Equal Justice Initiative. EJI’s New Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration
Teaching at NYU
Stevenson joined the clinical faculty at New York University School of Law in 1998 and holds the titles of Aronson Family Professor of Criminal Justice and University Professor.15NYU School of Law. Bryan A. Stevenson He teaches capital punishment law and runs a racial justice litigation clinic coordinated directly with EJI’s caseload, where students work on active cases challenging discriminatory sentencing, police practices, and jury selection.16NYU School of Law. Bryan A. Stevenson – Biography
Honors
Stevenson received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 for his death penalty work.17National Endowment for the Humanities. Bryan Stevenson In 2018, the American Bar Association awarded him the ABA Medal, its highest honor.18The American Law Institute. Bryan Stevenson to Receive 2018 ABA Medal He was named to the Time 100 list in 2015 and received the Right Livelihood Award in 2020 for his work on criminal justice reform and racial reconciliation.19Right Livelihood. Bryan Stevenson
Background and Education
Stevenson was born on November 14, 1959, in Milton, a small town in southern Delaware. His mother, Alice Golden Stevenson, worked as an equal opportunity officer at Dover Air Force Base. The family attended Prospect African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he played piano and sang in the choir as a child.
He earned both a law degree from Harvard Law School and a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government in 1985.20Harvard Law School. Renowned Public Interest Lawyer Bryan Stevenson ’85 Named Harvard Law School’s 2020 Graduation Speaker During law school, he worked with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, where he first visited death row inmates who had no legal representation. He stayed on at the Southern Center as a staff attorney after graduating, representing capital defendants across the Deep South before moving to Alabama in the late 1980s.16NYU School of Law. Bryan A. Stevenson – Biography