Stevenson reflects on inequities in justice system 10 years after release of 'Just Mercy'

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Bryan Stevenson, the prominent lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has blazed a trail, representing the poor, wrongly convicted and those on death row.

He recently sat down with Geoff Bennett to discuss his career and the rerelease of his bestselling book, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.”

Geoff Bennett: Bryan Stevenson, thanks for being with us.

Bryan Stevenson, Founder, Equal Justice Initiative: My pleasure.

Geoff Bennett: “Just Mercy” was first published in October of 2014. It became a New York Times bestseller. It was adapted into a film starring Michael B. Jordan. Lots of acclaim and attention.

How has it significantly changed the criminal justice system or the public’s understanding of the system in the decade since its release?

Bryan Stevenson: I have been really encouraged by what’s happened over the last 10 years.

When I started doing this work 40 years ago, there were very few organizations, there were very few resources available to people who were in jails and prisons, people wrongly convicted, people condemned to die. And that seemed to be not changing.

But, in the last 20 years, I will say, but certainly in the last 10 years, that has shifted enormously. We have had eight states abolish the death penalty. The rates of incarceration have dropped. We’re no longer seeing that steady increase that we saw during the last decades of the 20th century. We have seen some real significant reforms.

Most of the young people that I wrote about in “Just Mercy” who were condemned to die in prison when they were 13 and 14 have been released and they’re now out. So I have been really encouraged by the success we have seen over the last decade, but more so by the number of people who are now engaged on these issues, on campuses, in policy spaces, in legislatures.

Overincarceration is something that there’s a broad perspective of alignment on that we should be doing better to — than what we have done over the last half-century. So that’s been really encouraging.

Geoff Bennett: You write in the book that: “The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent.”

Tell me more about that.

Bryan Stevenson: Well, I have had the great privilege of standing next to condemned people, people who are marginalized, people who are hated, people who are despised, people who have been accused of really upsetting crimes.

And what I have learned is that when you stand next to people who are condemned and hated, you can sometimes harness the power of grace and mercy and show the world something better than just condemnation. We have had a legal system for a long time that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.

And we haven’t been concerned about changing that because we have just ignored this population. And I think by highlighting the people and the stories, that has shifted. And when you make the kind of mistakes that we have made — this year, we saw the 200th person exonerated after being sentenced to death.

And that’s a really startling and troubling statistic. For every eight people we have executed, we have now identified one innocent person on death row. It’s a shocking rate of error. But if we don’t think in a compassionate way, in a caring way about these communities, these people, these institutions, we will be indifferent to a lot of cruelty, a lot of barbarity, a lot of unjust punishment.

And so, for me, invoking mercy, invoking grace, invoking this idea that the criminal justice system isn’t just about the people we are prosecuted, it’s also about us, it’s about what kind of society we live in, what kind of community we create when we tolerate injustice and inequality.

Geoff Bennett: There are some 40 people on federal death row, including the gunmen who killed those nine parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, the attacker who gunned down 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Why should any of those people be shown mercy? Why should any of them be spared the death penalty, given the gravity and intentionality of their crimes?

Bryan Stevenson: Well, it’s largely because we don’t need to execute people to show our concern, our outrage about violent crimes.

If all of those folks have their death sentence commuted, they’re going to be serving death-in-prison sentences. They’re going to die in prison. They are terminal sentences. It’s a really extreme punishment. In most of the democratic world, life imprisonment without parole is the most severe punishment you can impose.

And so I don’t think it’s really about sparing people or giving people a break. They’re going to be held accountable in a really harsh way. It’s also true that many of those folks on the row have been unfairly prosecuted. There are problems with the way in which we sometimes go about getting these convictions and sentences.

Even many of the victims in the Charleston case did not want Dylann Roof to be sentenced to death, and yet we push forward. And now we’re moving into an era where the U.S. Supreme Court has seemed to largely abandon its oversight role in these cases. So I think there are multiple reasons for why it would be appropriate and I think positive to say we’re not going to kill people who we don’t have to kill, who are going to be condemned to prisons, who are going to die under incarcerations, that we don’t have to kill.

Geoff Bennett: Well, in fact, you write that we need a new era of truth and justice. What might that era look like?

Bryan Stevenson: I think it will better understand — it will be looking at to better understand the history that has created so much inequality and injustice. We have never really taken the time in this country to confront what happened to indigenous peoples when Europeans came to this continent.

We have never really reckoned with the legacy of slavery. Most people don’t know that there were 10 million Black people enslaved in this country. They don’t know the details of all of that abuse. We haven’t talked very much about the collapse of Reconstruction and how Black people were disenfranchised for a century, how thousands of Black people were pulled out of their homes and beaten and drowned and tortured on courthouse lawns in that era of lynching.

We understand what Jim Crow was, but we don’t actually understand the harm that decades of exclusion and humiliation — I was born in a community where Black children could not attend the public schools. I saw those signs. My parents had to navigate the humiliation of Jim Crow. And those signs weren’t directions. They were assaults. They created real injuries.

And we haven’t talked about those injuries. And we haven’t really committed to repairing the harm. So I think the first thing that truth and justice requires is that we actually become more informed about the truth of our history, not because we want to punish people.

When I talk about slavery and lynching and segregation, I have no interest in punishing America or people who were implicated in that. My interest is liberation. I actually think there is something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, and it’s waiting for us, but we’re being constrained by our unwillingness to talk honestly about the burden of this past, which I think has created toxins in the air.

It’s like there’s pollution everywhere in this country because we haven’t been honest about this history. And I think that truth-telling can truly set us free.

Geoff Bennett: Bryan Stevenson. The book is “Just Mercy,” updated with a new prologue 10 years after its initial release.

Always a pleasure to speak with you.

Bryan Stevenson: And you too. Thanks.