Truly a depressing book although Bryan Stevenson is a veritable hero. A good companion piece to read with this book is the profile of Stevenson in The New Yorker, August 22, 2016. It has more information about his Equal Justice Initiative and additional frightful details of how capital punishment is being used in the south to replace lynching. Studies have revealed that in the twelve southern states studied, they found records of about four thousand lynchings. It was the ultimate in terrorism.
Alabama has no legal defender system so many people have been incarcerated without legal representation. Bryan Stevenson was instrumental in using federal funds to create a non-profit organization that provided attorneys for the indigent. The book has many stories of the unjustly incarcerated not to mention children who have been sentenced to life in prison for crimes they supposedly committed while barely in their teens; sometimes crimes they were conned into by adults.
The book is a series of vignettes about people Stevenson has tried to help and who exemplify the problems with race and the “law” in the south. The link that holds all the disparate stories together is the McMillian case. McMillian was charged and held on death row for six years until, thanks to Stevenson, exonerated. The sheriff had buried evidence that showed McMillian could not possibly have committed the crime, but because he was having an affair with a white woman was ripe bait for an official lynching. Ironically, the case played out in Monroeville, Alabama, the town immortalized in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Interracial marriage, not to mention sex, was feared in the south and made illegal, enforced not just legally but through the terror of lynching. It remained illegal in most of the country until 1967 and Loving v Virginia in 1967. The Alabama Constitution continued to prohibit it even in 1986. It was not until 2000 that a ballot initiative removed it from their Constitution, and even then 40% of Alabamians voted to retain it.
Alabama elects its judges and is one of the few states where a judge can overrule a jury’s recommendation for life in prison with the death penalty. This means that judges compete with one another to be the toughest on crime and what better way to demonstrate that conviction than by sentencing loads of people to death.
Stevenson has appeared several times before the Supreme Court. The McMillian case itself wound up before them. Because Sheriff Tate had withheld exculpatory evidence that would have freed McMillan, he sued but by a 5-4 decision the Court affirmed the lower courts which had decided that the sheriff was acting on behalf of the state rather than the County, and therefore the County could not be held liable for his actions.
Steven's crowning achievement came in Miller v Alabama in which the Supreme Court decided that a life sentence for juveniles was disproportionately severe and unconstitutional.
Links: https://eji.org/bryan-stevenson
Miller v Alabama https://www.oyez.org/cases/2011/10-9646
McMillian v Monroe County, Alabama: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1996/96-542
Florida V Sullivan: 13-yr. old convicted of sexual battery and sentenced to life in prison without parole. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2009/08-7621
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