PROGRAM

Join us at Roosevelt House for a special evening with Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. A MacArthur “Genius” award winner and one of the leading public interest lawyers of our time, Stevenson will discuss his recently memoir,  Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship-and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy, a New York Times bestseller, is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Bryan Stevenson, Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners since 1985, when he was a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights. Since 1989 he has been Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a private, nonprofit law organization he founded that litigates on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged, poor people denied effective representation and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct.Stevenson, a 1995 MacArthur Fellow, was also awarded the 2000 Olaf Palme Prize, among other honors. He has published manuals on capital litigation and written extensively on criminal justice, capital punishment and civil rights issues, including his most recent book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a New York Timesbestseller. He graduated from Eastern College and has a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.