'Hopelessness is the enemy of justice': an interview with Bryan Stevenson.

• Author: Strang, Dean A.
• Position: Interview

Most trial lawyers engage, daily, with the emotions and vices that underlie human conflict--anger, jealousy, greed, spite. Some do more than engage: They adopt these vices. Bryan Stevenson is the rare exception. He has dedicated his life to healing anger and fear, and bringing light to the darkest corners of our criminal justice system.

Harvard graduate, MacArthur fellow, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson is vibrantly bright and thoughtful. He exudes hope. He lives much of his life among the dispossessed and hopeless.

I first met Bryan Stevenson more than twenty-five years ago in Montgomery, Alabama. He was shepherding a small group of smart young lawyers through the grim reality of post-conviction work in death penalty cases in Alabama's courts. Today, he speaks to large groups and travels the country. Stevenson calls on us to hurry after him through the death rows, prisons, impoverished communities, and despairing neighborhoods he serves, and to nurture, within ourselves and without, the emotions and virtues that heal.

His new book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, is a bestseller. I visited with him when he came to Madison, Wisconsin, where he had been chosen as the University of Wisconsin's "Go Big Read" author. Hundreds of people turned out to pack a giant lecture hall and several adjoining spaces to hear Stevenson speak.

Q: The message of hope in your book is un* mistakable, but I suspect that the origin of the book lies in part with anger. I'm wondering if that's right.

Bryan Stevenson: I think of it as a burden rather than anger. I didn't have to represent people on death row, I didn't have to do the kind of work that I do, and I never wanted my choice to become something that made me angry. When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people.

We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me. The book is an effort to confront this burden.

I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change. I don't think anybody who had been with me when I was holding a fourteen-year-old boy who was crying hysterically because he had been raped and abused in a jail cell would want him to stay in that cell. But our system of justice is so isolated. We've created these walls and barriers that shield what happens in our courtrooms and in our jails and prisons and in the margins of society with such effectiveness that most of us go through our lives with no consciousness about what these things...