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Restoring the Justice System
America now boasts the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but even more alarming are the system’s endemic injustices. Minority communities are far more afflicted by the justice system, a reality that affects the psyches of the children who grow up in them. Additionally, our system treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. Bryan Stevenson believes these realities are fundamentally changing our world, and he’s devoted his life’s work to finding solutions.
Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. 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, recently succeeded in winning a ban on life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of most crimes in the U.S. and has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts. His work fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system has won him awards including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award Prize, the Olaf Palme International Prize, the ACLU National Medal Of Liberty, the National Public Interest Lawyer of the Year Award, the NAACP Ming Award for Advocacy, and the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, and is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
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