With growing focus on the failures of the criminal justice system, Bryan Stevenson has been fighting those injustices case by case. He is founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a group based in Alabama that represents some of this country’s most marginalized people — the poor and the wrongfully convicted. Stevenson has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court six times. In 2012, he won a landmark Supreme Court case that barred states from giving mandatory life sentences without parole to children. The Nobel Prize-winning South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called Stevenson "America’s young Mandela." Others have compared him to Atticus Finch, the fearless, fictional hero of Harper Lee’s seminal novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." Stevenson’s book tells many stories, but focuses in particular on his battle to free an African-American man named Walter McMillian, who was falsely convicted and condemned to die for killing a white woman in Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Full episodes of Democracy Now! can be viewed at the link: https://freespeech.org/collection/democracy-now

Ferguson Michael Brown Poverty