Additional funding is provided by. Corporate funding is provided by. Welcome to firing line, Bryan Stevenson. Thank you. You are the cofounder and the executive dictor the equal Justice Initiative in montgomery, alabama. And you have won relief for more than 130 death row inmates and hundreds of other accused and have argued five cases in front of the Supreme Courtof he United States. Now a hollywood movie,ma r motion picture, is coming out about your life based on the book you wrote, just merc im going to show you a clip of that movie. Lets take a look. The first time i visited death row, i wasnt expecting to meet somebody the same age as me. Your life is still meaningful, and im gonna do Everything Possible to keep them from taking it. You dont know what youre into down he in alabama, where youre guilty from the moment youre born. Rd. G mr. Mcmillian. Were done here. Mr. Mcmillian, please. You saw jamie foxx there, who plays Walter Mcmillian. Yes. An innocent man who is sentenced to death by a judge th a name none other tha robert e. Lee key. Yes. T whappened with that case . Its a really fascinating case for a lot oreasons. First of all, it takes place in monroeville, alabama, which is the community where harper lee grew up and wrote the beloved vel to kill a mockingbird. And that Community Celebrates that story. They embrace that story. They romanticized that story. T when i got involved in Walter Mcmillians case, a black man wrongfully accusedil ofng a young white woman, it was almost as if they couldnt make the connection. He was actually miles from the crime when the crime took pla, surrounded by dozens of black people who could confirm his innocence. And he was largely prosecutedad because he hadn affair with a young white woman, which provoked people to see him as this dangerous person. He was convicted and sentenced to life without paroley the jury, and the judge overrodery the verdict of life animposed the Death Penalty. And he spent the next six yearsa on row for a crime he didnt commit. I got involved and was really chaenged by people who didnt think i should represent someone like that. We got death threats. Ot weomb threats. There were all kinds of efforts to undermine my quest to kind of overturn his conction. And the film gets into all of those details. But wh was interesting to me about it is the way in which we can have thiideat abo we are as a community, as a nation, and not live out those ideas and values in real time when actual peoples lives are at risk,t and thats wppened to Walter Mcmillian. The outcome of to kill a mockingbird is a very different outcome than what happened with Walter Mcmillian because of your legal work, and it seems to me that that sort of bothers you. Well, i think i you know, we hl of these awards that are named after atticus finch, and we celebrate that story as a lawyer like you. Yeah. But who didnt win acquittal for his defendant. I dont want to be atticus finch. I nt think its enough to just stand with someone who is innocent and then see them wrongly convicted and ultimately dieof from a lacope. I think we have to demand more. We have to expect moreus thanshowing up. And so, for me, i want people who had been wrongly convicted and condemned to win their freedom. I want our system to do better than what it has done for too long. You began this work sitting acrosshe tab from a man who was roughly your age, feeling utterly incapable of being able touster what it was that he needed. But what he needed ended up not being your legal expertise, but but what . I think what many people who live in the margins of our society need, what many people who have been disfavored and excluded and condemned need is they need others to get close enough to recognize that they are more than the worst thing theyve ever done, to get close enough to understand the nature of the issues that have excluded, marginalized, and died them. And, yeah, i was a law studt struggling at harvard law school. Id never met a lawyer l until i got school, and i was really trying to find my path, and meeting condemned prisoners on georgias death row, who were literally dying for legal sistance, and seeing their humanity and seeing their need and their struggle for dignity really changed things for meid in ways that it expect. And i became persuaded that its protecting the rights of the people who are most hated, most despised, most disfavored, sometimes most rejected that is the ultimate test for our commitment to t rule of law. Thats where we can evaluate whether re truly prepared to be a just society. And that encounter ally shaped things for m and chged things for me in ways that he continued to this day. You are played by michael b. Jordan. Mmhmm. How does he do . He does great. Im really flattered and honored. Its kind of a thrill to have somebody as populard celebrated as michael b. Playing me. I told him, when he ok on the role, he didnt have to get rid of his black panther body when he played me, and [chuckling] he seemed to honor that a bit. So its been really excitingto ee, you know, the film come out, and im excited agr people to see it becau i think its a wayn, of getting more people closer to this worldat e have created in america that often treats you better if youre rich and guilty than if youre poor and innocent. Anthony ray hinton. Yes. Is another man who you defended. S he spent 30 ye death row for a murder in wch modern ballistic science ended up demonstrating that he was innocent. Gh thats he was also accused of two murders, actually, and codnt get the expert help he needed when he was convicted and tried. And as a result of that, he was found guiltyea and put on row. We got involved in the case in 1999, and i found the best experts in the country to test this evidence. Ey uickly concluded that the gun didnt match the bullets didnt mch the gun that had been obtained from his home. And so they were very confident that he has he was innocent. We just couldnt get anybody to Pay Attention to that. And i do think thats one of the challenges withur Death Penalty today. We tolerate a lot of error. Mr. Hinton was the 156th person exonerated, proved innocent after being sentenced to death. Were now over 1, which means that, for every nine people weve execut in this country, weve now identified one innocent person on death row. Its a shocking rate of error. We wouldnt tolerate that error in most other areas of our life. If somebody said, for every nine apples in the store, if you tou one, it will kill you, no one would sell apples. We wouldnt tolerate onout of nine planes crashing from the sky and everyone dying, and yet we tolerate it in the admistrationen of the deathty, and thats the challenge that i see us facing. D how h and Forensic Technology changed the equation . I think its had a huge impact theres no question that dna, in particular,s has helpedcover wrongful convictions, but its a small subset of the large universe of wrongful convictions. Dna is typically most effective in cases where theres been Sexual Assault or where theres biological evidence that you can test. Thats a very small fraction of the kinds of cases that he sent many people to death row or people to prison for life with no chance of parole. We are making progress, but it wont actually make a difference if we dont create a different culre. If we dont have a mindset that actually abhors wrongful conviction, that doesnt insate our prosecutors and our police when they make mistakes. E wet to create a whole new system of incentives in. Ur criminal justice syst so one of the things ive heard you say is, we dont deserve to kill. Mmhmm. Mmhmm. What do you what do you mean . Well, i think the threshold question for the Death Penalty isnt, do pple deserve to die for the crimes theyve committed . I think thats the question a lot of people focus on. But, for me, the question is, do we deserve to kill . Do we have a system that is sufficiently reliable at we can entrust it with the ultimate power to take someones life . Do we have a system thats free of bias against people of color . Do we have a system n thatpolitical . Do we have a system that is gog to be fair even when theres anger and frustration . Walter mcmillian was largely convicted because people were fred and angry that the prosecutor and the police hadnt solvedri that. And with that kind of prsure, they did something that they shouldnt have d they coerced people to testify falsely against him, ltedh re in a wrongful conviction. And a system vulnerable to those kinds of pressures is one i dont think deserves to kill. Ground zero for the dea penalty at the Supreme Court is mccleskey vs. Kemp, right . Mmhmm. The 17 Supreme Court case. D in a 54 decision, the court affirmed the Death Penalty t thats constitutional. And it was Justice Lewis powell who said apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice syem. When you hear that it is inevitable. Mm. How do you hear that . Im im heartbroken by it. I thinfor the United StatesSupreme Court to concede to as and the inevitability of racialc mination is completely inconsistent with the courts obligation to enforce the rule of law. As you mentioned, Justice Powell wrote the majority opinion. D en he left the bench, when he retired, he was asked if there were any opinions w ld like to do over, if he had any regrets, ande mccleskey was the two cases that he identified. Did he say wh he said he recognized now that he wasnt actuall committing to the rule of law the way he should have. And he regretted that decision. U but, unftely, it was too late and we still live under the cloud created by mccleskey. When you say that we dont deserve to kill, are there any circumstances really severe circumstances, cases of mass murder where the perpetrator is is clear . Im thinking of Timothy Mcveigh and the Oklahoma City bombings. To me, its not about the offender and the violence. E there people do horrific things, and ty have to be held accountable. I absolutely believe in accountability. I believe that we have an obligation to protect people from others who would try to harm us. Av we dontto execute anybody, though. We have the ability. Uhhuh. To confine and to impris people without execution. For me, the question is, d there a system so free of bias thsnt discriminate against the poor, that doet allow politics to influence the way decisionmaking happens, and i cant see at system i dont see that system. Youve been making that argument for many years now. Yes. Youve even made it on firingine in the past. [ laughs ] a younger Bryan Stevenson in 1994 argued participated in a debate on the merits of the death penty and the demerits of the Death Penalty with william f. Buckley jr. , and i would like to show you. [ c. Some of your earlier self making just this argument. Ts take a look. In the state of georgia, when a black defendant is sentenced to death and 4 of the 12 jurors who sentenced him say the ku klux klan do good things in that community, when that defense lawy says that, i believe my client is genetically predisposed to commit violent crimes, and thats why im comfortable th his death sentence. When the trial judge and the prosecutor refer to that black defendant as colored y throughout the trial, thats racial bias. And that person is on death row today. And your office is prosecuting him, trying to move him toward execution. You shouldnt stand up here and present like theres no racial bias in georgia. Thats the georgia of 1994. Do you think that, since 1994, as a country, weve come a little closer to understanding the argument youve been making all along, that there is Racial Discrimination that plays into sentencing . I dthink theres a growing recognition that theeight t our history is not something that we can continignore. Weve seen the Supreme Court, and weve seen other institutions responding dramatic evidence of bias and discrimination. T but, for me, t a consequence of work that were just begi i think were just starting to actually create a consciousness about how we are going to dealis with this longry of racial inequality. So this work is referred to as narrative work. Yes. What is narrative work . I mean, your work has shifted om, you know, being on t front lines of Legal Defense to narrative work. Can you explain that to us . Yeah, its undernhe debates, underneath the topics that you heapeople arguing about, there are narratives that actually shape the way we think. Stories. Stories, but ideas, values. So, for example, in ninet in the 1970s and 8 we declared a misguided war on drugs. We said that peoe who are drugaddicted and drugdependent are criminals, and we need our criminal Justice System to respond to that crisis. We could have said that people with addiction and dendency have a health problem, and we need our Healthcare System to respond to that. E reason why we made the crime choice was because we were being governed by what i call the politics of fear and anger. It was a narrative that t had to be tough on crime, that people who do exactly what we want them to do are criminals, and we use that narrative to justif these extreme nishments. And i think we havto change that narrative because i think fear and anger are the essential ingredientsof ppression and injustice. If you go anywhere in the world where people are abuseded or opprethe oppressors will give you a narrative of fear and anger. Thats what was behind the genocide in rwanda. Thats what was behind the holocaust. Thats whats behind all of the abuse we see today. So the narrative has to shift. And so what were trying to do is to change the narrative when it comes to our history of racial inequality. A werstgenocide nation. What we did to native peopleea when eur came to this continent was a genocide. We didnt call it that because we said that native people were savages,hi and we usenarrative of racial difference those people are different to justify that violence. And that narrative is what then got us comfortable with 2 1 2 centuries of slavery. Ani think the great evil of american slavery wasnt involuntary servitude and forced labor n it was trative, the idea that black people arent as good ashite people, theyre not fully human, theyre not evolved that ideology of White Supremacy that emerged from that narrative was the true evil, and thats why ive argued that slavery doesnt end in 1865 it just evolves. And that means we have work to do. So you one of the things ure doing in order to help with that work is youve built and foundedeu the legacy min alabama. Yeah. And the Legacy Museum helps to tell the stor from slavery to lynching to segregationat to mass incarcn. And i think, of those four components, people are very familiar th three of them. Mmhmm. But that lynchi was such a such a critical part in between slavery and segregation. Yes. Is very eyeopening. Its part of our history that weve almost ner talked about. I mean, you go from the civil war to the Civil Rights Era as if Nothing Happened in between, when, in fact, it was a really dark periodn in ameristory, where thousands of black people were pulled out of their homes and beaten a drowned and murdered and hanged. Millions of black people were ed. Ror we had this mass migration, where 6 million black people fled the American South to the north and west. And so, for us talking about what happens in america during that century is really critical to understanding wherwe are in america today. So we created a memorial that tells t sto. We have been trying to create a new iconography. We want to put up maat every lynching site in america. We want to disrupt the silence. Anso we actually send people, Community Members to go to the sites, and we ask them to dig so at the lynching site. And we put them in jars with the names of those lynching victims, with the dates of those lynchings. And we have those jars on display in our museum and it just becomes a tangible way to give honor and meaning to the lives of thousands of people who were vicms of this terror and violence that really represents an abandonment of our commitment to the rule of law, and e demographic geography today is shaped by that era because we have millions of black people in cleveland and chicago and detroit and los angeles and oakland o didnt go to those communities as immigrants they went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South, r and were trying to recoat knowledge, that understanding, and we use things like the jar of soil and the monuments and our memorial and the stories of survivorsat to ca new relationship to this history. And a new relationship to the history that tellshe history so that we can understand the history in order to really accept thery. Yeah. And then, on some level, apologize for some part of it. Recover, repair the damage. I really do believe that theres Something Better ryiting for us in this cou i think theres something that feels more like freedom and equality than what weve experienced, but we cant get there unless were willing to commit to a process of truth and repair truth and justice, trh and reconciliation. And for me, those things are sequential. You got to tell the trutho before you getconciliation or repair injustice, and thats whatfa were trying tlitate. And sometimes people hear me talking about this history, and theyhink i wt to punish america for the system. I have no interest in punishment. My interest is in liberation. You know, i come from a faith traditn where our redemption and restoration and repair comes after confession and repentance, and you cant skip the confessing part just to get to the redemption part. And i just think collectely, as a nation, we need i be thinking about that. Thats what happen south africa after apartheid. Thats what happened in rwanda. Thats whats happened in germany. But in this country, we havent made that commitment, and i think we still struggle t. A result of t one contribution to this narrative understanding of reconciliation i think was made by Michelle Obama in 2016 when she addressed the democratic nional convention. Yeah. Id like to show you what she said and then reflect on that. I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. [ cheers and applause ] and. [ cheers and applause continue a and h my daughters,au two ful, intelligent black young women, playing with their ds on the white house lawn. [ cheers and applause ] and yet, not all reactions to that were the same. Yeah. There were there was coentary from conservative quarters, from different parts of the country that, frankly, tried to justify. Yeah. At the white house had been built by slaves. It was written about in the press. One commentator well, the slaves were wellfed and put in safe and sturdy lodging. Yeah. You know, for me, that was such a powerful moment in american history, to see an africanamerican womag gioice to this reality. But we are so unpracticed in talking truthfully about our history. Its not a surprise that it was met with derision and criticism. We have been practicing silence for a really long time. And when you disrupt silence, people get nervous, they get anxious but it is exactly how we recover. It is actly how we make progress. Some people feel like we dont have the capacity to talk honestly about what happened to native people and to talk honestly about slavery and lynching and segregation. T i actualnk those people underestimate the power of this country to survive, the power of the people in this country to overcome. D i just think we are doubting what it really means a great nation when we continue to allowurselves to avoid these hard conversations that need to be had. You say the opposite of poverty is not wealth its justice. Am persuaded that sometimes we ta too much about money in america. I really do believe t th opposite of poverty isnt wealth. I believe the opposite of poverty is justice. We havgenerational poverty in the africanamerican community. My dad was a smart person. Mm. He was hardworking. Mmhmm. He wareally, really dedicated to the things did. He couldnt go to high school because of unjust racial bias, and, therefore, didnt have the oprtunities that ive had. If we had done justice, we could have actually created opportunities for him so we didn have to grow up poor. Thats what i mean is that when we challenge the unjust structures and systems, when we dont allow people to reach their full potential because we create barriers and boundaries that are shaped by unjust practices, we give rise to the kind of poverty that we see. The u. S. Prison population rose 700 . Yes. Between 1972 and 2009. Yes. It is down now 7 since 2009. And President Trump just last year signed the First Step Act,h whictens prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Many say, who are in of it and against it, that at least it was a first step. I think wre all grateful that weve made some small step, but its really important to recognize what that law is and what its not. First of all, the First Step Act only applies to people in federal p. Only 10 of the people in americas jails and psons are in federal custody, so this applies to a versmall percentage of that 10 . Look, i supported it. I think its a good thing. But we are deluding ourselves if we think that this is some huge step forward th regard to mass incarceration beuse it just doesnt deal with the heart of the problem, and the heart of the problem is that we have too many people in jails and prisons who are noh at to public safety. You know, were 5 of the worlds population, but 25 of the worlds in prison. We have a lot of work to do. Weve got hundreds of thousands eople we could release tomorrow, and the crime rates would not go up, but we wont because theres still too many people w want to be tough on crime, who are kd of wedded to that narrative of fear and anger. It seems to me some of the greatest partners in the reforms that youre talking about have been sort of surprisingly in the red states in the south well, thats right. Kentucky to mississippi to louisiana. Yeah, absolutely. Well, i mean, you know, if you have an ideology that abhors big government, then you aolutely ought to be appalled by mass incarceration. It is the largest segment of State Government spending increasingly because wee invested so many billions into this industry, and is an industry. Weve got prate players now that are benefiting by having these high levels of incarceration, and thats a real threat. You recently wrote the new york times. How are we more free after weve reconciled with our past . Well, iyou know. Whats that look like . I just think we can we can truly embrace whats st, and there was a me where the best Baseball Players couldnt play baseball the best basketball players couldnt play basketball. Our sports were a sham. D thnt actually reflect what human beings can do when they actually. Mmit themselves to proce but when we broke down those barriers, we began to see what a truly integrated sports world couldnt create. And what weve seen is magical. S pectacular. And i think the same opportunities and the same kind of spectacle of greatness awaits us. But weve got to break down all the barriers, and those barriers still exist i business. They exist in economics. They exist in education. Ey exist in too many areas of our life. And the great thing that we can become is waiting for us when we actually commit to elimiting those barriers. The same is true for gender. How long did we not allow our most gifted and lented journalists and filmmakers and storytellers liticians have the platforms that they deserve because we didnt think thatn woould be in those spaces . When those barriers have come down and we still have more to take down we begin to understand what all of our committed talentow and collective can lead us to achieve. But as long as we put restraints based on c or gender or bias shaped bsomething else, o ll never be the Great Society that were meant. Bryan stevenson, for the work you do, thank you very much for being a Leading Light of this generation and for returning to firing line. Thank you very much. Great to be back. Firing line with Margaret Hoover is made possible by. Additional funding is provided by. Corporate funding is provided by. The people who gave the money to nake mister rogerghborhood are the people of this and other. And. Its a Beautiful Day in this neighborhood a Beautiful Day for a neighbor would you be mine . Could you be mine . Its a neighborly day in this beauty wood a neighborly day for a beauty