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EJI Founder
Bryan Stevenson
Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative
The Equal Justice Initiative is a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites which opened in 2018: The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias. Mr. Stevenson is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
Bryan Stevenson, in the Prologue to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Just Mercy, writes:
“I’m proud that we have now opened three cultural sites in Montgomery, Alabama, to foster truth-telling about our history of racial injustice. Each week, thousands of people come to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which memorializes victims of lynching in America, and many visitors are visibly moved by what they discover. At our Legacy Museum, which explores the evolution of unjust bigotry from slavery until today, visitors seem to understand things they did not learn in school. The newest of our Legacy Sites, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, explores the institution of slavery, the lives of enslaved people, and the continuing legacy of this tragic era. Visitors have intensely emotional experiences when they confront this history—and at the same time, I see many who come to Montgomery leave filled with hope and energized by the belief that we are capable of a different future.”
#DeltaRemembers