The US lawyer on the frontline of the fight for equality in criminal justice

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of racial injustice in America's deep south in the 1930s, was set in a fictionalised version of her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

It tells the story of the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, through the eyes of his defence lawyer's daughter. A jury convicts Robinson, despite clear evidence of his innocence.

The lawyer, Atticus Finch, is an archetype of legal morality in the US. The Alabama Bar Association erected a monument to the character outside the Monroeville courthouse in 1997.

Its inscription includes the following: “The legal profession has in Atticus Finch, a lawyer-hero who knows how to use power and advantage for moral purposes, and who is willing to stand alone as the conscience of the community.”

The courthouse is a museum now, with a section dedicated to Lee. It stages a popular production of To Kill a Mockingbird every spring.

Similar case

Ironically, in 1988, almost three decades after the book’s publication, a black man named Walter McMillan stood trial for the murder of a young white woman in Monroeville. Despite presenting six alibi witnesses who testified they were with McMillan at a church dinner at the time of the murder, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

During a post-conviction case, McMillan’s young lawyer proved that police coerced the state’s key witness to implicate McMillan in the crime. He presented evidence that prosecutors had concealed information, and two of the state’s witnesses retracted their testimonies.

McMillan had spent six years on death row before his conviction was overturned.

Bryan Stevenson was his lawyer and tells the story, and others like it, in his new book Just Mercy. "It exposed me to just how complicated achieving just outcomes for poor people can be, because it really showed me there are people not just indifferent to the needs of the poor, but actively hostile of acknowledging error."

A Harvard law school graduate, Stevenson has spent his career campaigning against inequality in the US criminal justice system. He founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an Alabama non-profit that provides legal representation to people who have been denied fair and just treatment.

After he qualified, he worked as a staff attorney at the Southern Centre for Human Rights. Because he had a lot of cases in Alabama, he said, it was hard to ignore the problems there.

Alabama has more death penalty convictions per capita than any other state in the US. At the same time, it is the only state that has no publicly funded legal representation for death row prisoners.

Stevenson founded the EJI after recognising the need for an institutional presence in the state. The organisation has become known for landmark death penalty reversals.

“We realised that to really change the dynamic that creates these problems, we’ve got to talk a lot more about poverty and race . . . outside the criminal justice system as well.”

A deeper problem

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Stevenson thinks mass incarceration and death penalty convictions are symptoms of underlying racial and economic inequalities.

He is no stranger to the country's legacy of fraught race relations. He once had a frightening encounter with police officers in Atlanta, Georgia.

“They saw me sitting in my car in front of my apartment and thought I was up to some criminal misdeed. They confronted me, and I was actually pulled out on to the street, and an officer pointed a gun and threatened to shoot me in the head.”

Stevenson called it an “unnerving and terrifying experience”.

“I was 28 at the time and had enough sense to say to the officers, ‘It’s all right. It’s okay.’ Ten years earlier, I probably would have run, and God knows what would have happened.”

Stevenson is a professor of law at New York University. He has lectured at Harvard and Yale. He won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award and too many others to mention. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called him "America's young Nelson Mandela".

But he started his academic life at a segregated primary school in a poor, rural area of Delaware, a small state on the east coast of the US. Although not in the deep south, Stevenson said the area was "very southern" and was segregated when he was a child.

Formative years

“Those were formative years for me . . . I saw the damage done by racial hierarchy.”

He went to an integrated high school and then on to college, an opportunity his parents never had.

When asked about his trajectory from a segregated primary school to Harvard Law, he laughed. “I never set that out as a goal.” He was “fortunate and curious” and did what interested him.

Harvard was a world of privilege and power. “I was fortunate to not be distracted or intimidated by that,” he said.

“A lot of people go to law school and want to do public interest and social justice work,” he said. But they get derailed by institutional norms that equate success with money and jobs at Wall Street law firms.

Power and wealth were tempting, Stevenson said, but they were not of interest. “Coming from a poor community shaped what meant most to me, even in a setting like Harvard law.”

His background kept the challenge of addressing racial inequality front and centre, and it is something he notices even when travelling abroad.

Access to justice for the poor and "how we confront legacies of inequality and oppression" are issues that many countries, including Ireland, share with the US. Bryan Stevenson will be speaking about access to justice at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin today at 6pm. It is the eighth annual Dave Ellis Memorial Lecture organised by Free Legal Advice Centres. For more information, see iti.ms/1HFWAs6