Transcripts For ALJAZAM Talk To Al Jazeera 20160227

Reconstruction and world war ii rivals anything we read about in the mideast today perpetrated by isis. The lawyer and his staff have worked to help more than 100 wrongly condemned prisoners awaiting death. For every nine people weve executed, weve identified one innocent person on death row, who was proved innocent. Its a shocking rate of error. If for every nine planes that took off, one crashed and everybody died, the f. A. A. Wouldnt let anybody fly. The author of just mercy has also taken on cases to challenge extreme sentencing; to defend children tried as adults. We are wrong to use our criminal Justice System in the way that we are using it, as a warehouse for the mentally ill, as a repository for the poor murder is not an abstract thing in stevensons life, his grandfather was stabbed to death. 86 years old, in a house, kids tryin to get money stabbed him to death. And theres a lot more violence and victimization in my family than i than id that id like to even think about. I spoke to Bryan Stevenson in new york. So in the last year, its been a zeitgeist issue of videos of Police Shooting Young Africanamerican men. And theres shock. Theres outrage. But this this kind of relationship between police and the black community, this started long before cell phones started capturing it on camera, right . Like, how far back do you go with this . Yeah. Well, i think you have to go back to slavery. The reason why young men of color are at risk in too many of our streets is that there is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to people of color. And we act on that presumption in ways that are sometimes violent. And these Police Officers are reacting to this narrative of racial difference, this presumption of guilt and dangerousness that you cant understand unless you think about the legacy of slavery. Even before slavery, the genocide of Indigenous People in this country, where we began to shape our whole worldview based on color. I mean, for me, the great evil of american slavery wasnt involuntary servitude. It wasnt forced labor. It was really this ideology of White Supremacy we made up to make ourselves feel comfortable with enslavement. We said that black people are different. Theyve got these deficits, etc. Were actually civilizing them by enslaving them. And that was the great evil of american slavery. And we never dealt with that. So its easy for me to fall into the trap of saying, look, slavery happened so long ago that i dont feel any relationship to it. But in your family you were much more connected to it than i realize even possible in todays times. Well, thats right. No, my grandmother was the daughter of people who were raised by who were born into slavery. I mean, my great grandparents were enslaved. But i think for all of us the legacy of slavery is still around us. Because if the great evil of american slavery was this narrative of racial difference, when we read the 13th amendment, it doesnt talk about that ideology of White Supremacy. It talks about involuntary servitude, enforced labor. So we dont actually end slavery and the worst part of slavery in 1865. Slavery doesnt end. It just evolves. It turns into decades where we use that same narrative to justify terrorism perpetrated against African Americans throughout this country and brutal public spectacle lynchings. What we did to African Americans between the end of reconstruction and world war ii rivals anything we read about in the mideast today perpetrated by isis. We strung people up, we mutilated them, we set them on fire, we shot them a hundred times, we cut off parts of their body and took it home as souvenirs. And then we didnt talk about it. We just sort of moved it indoors and created a criminal Justice System that perpetuated that same narrative, even civil rights. We havent dealt with the hard parts of our history of segregation. We like to celebrate the civil rights movement. We talk about it like its this triumph of heroic black people doing extraordinary things. And heroic black people did do some extraordinary things, but there was opposition to civil rights. There was resistance to civil rights by elected officials. And if you dont know that resistant story, if you dont know how that continued past the 1960s into the 1970s, you cant understand mass incarceration and excessive punishment today. And at each point of these historical eras, people who identified with Law Enforcement, they were the foot soldiers empowered to sustain this racial hierarchy. They were the ones who were maintaining the rules of slavery. They tracked the explicitly or implicitly . Do you think they knew that. That thats one of my jobs here . Oh, absolutely. I mean, during the era of slavery, it was the Law Enforcement that would chase the fugitive slaves into the north and bring them back. They were the ones that would enforce the conflicts. During the era of terrorism, thered be some accusation of the crime. And the sheriff would make the arrest, and then he would open up the jail doors to the mob, who would engage in these acts of violence. Theres been this complicity between Law Enforcement and this history. In mass incarceration in our contemporary era, it is the police who are being looked to to keep the public safe, but more than that, to sustain these dynamics, to resist any kind of challenge to this identity that weve grown up with. And so we need in america, truth and reconciliation. We need to kind of reshape our identity. Im not interested in punishing people for slavery or punishing people for terrorism. Im not interested in punishing people for segregation or even punishing people for police violence. Im interested in getting us to a place where were feeling something that looks more like freedom and justice. And we cant get there without truth and reconciliation. Go to germany where in less than 80 years, that nation has recovered from the holocaust, not by denying it, but by putting markers in stones at the home of every jewish family in berlin. By directing people who come to germany to auschwitz and the camps to reflect soberly on the history of the holocaust. In america, we do the opposite. We dont talk about slavery. So now that were in this period of our history where one in three black males is expected to go to jail or prison, where people of color are menaced and targeted on the streets of our country the question really is when will we stop, when will we change direction, when will we confront this legacy that we have created in america by our inaction, by our silence . Youre talking about much broader racial issues. Is that because of a moment in time that that were in . Is something happening now where theres a chance for this conversation . You know, actually, not for me. I think for me, its in recognizing that we can only get so far in the legal courts, in the courts, in the legal system. Weve got to change thats a symptom of the bigger problem . Thats exactly right. Weve got to change the broader environment. Weve got to actually create some movement in these spaces. So i go into courts. And i say, you know, this county under represents people of color. You dont let black people serve on juries. I go into courts and say, there are no people of color in the prosecutorial role or in the judge role or you know, and theres this indifference to that. Yet, when i Start Talking about this history and you put it in an historical context, everything changes you draw an incredible parallel there to the American South being as bad as isis, which is incredibly provocative to say. And that the black neighborhoods in l. A. And cleveland and chicago were refugees, not unlike the refugees from crisis we see today in europe. Yeah, and my critique is not that the south was as bad as that, but the acts of terror that people were allowed to engage in with impunity are no less gruesome and are no less provocative in the acts. I mean, if you hang a person out and you mutilate them and you set them on fire and then you shoot them and then you insist that they hang from the tree for a week and you make black people look at them as a statement to that community, youve done something horrific. And it has the parallels that we talk about in the modern context. And youre right, what happens in response to that is that millions of black people flee to chicago and cleveland and detroit, not as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities, but as refugees and exiles from terror. We have to stop telling the lies that we tell about who we are. You go to the American South and the landscape is littered with the iconography of the confederacy. We celebrate our history of slavery. We celebrate our era of terrorism. Weve got to actually create a bigger kind of space to be truthful about this history. Well, talk about erasing the Death Penalty, cause when you look at death row, there are blacks are not the majority that are there. There are actually more whites than blacks. But you have to look past that to find how race really plays into Death Penalty. Explain that. Sure, its race of the victim. So that Death Penalty is the blue ribbon we give to people who murder the folks we care most about. And because there is this hierarchy of whose lives matter 80 of the people on the death row are there for victims who are white. And even though people of color are much more likely to be the victims of homicide, they dont become the Death Penalty cases. And so it is still incredibly racially skewed and you find that evidence not just in the percentage of defendants of color, which is disproportionately high. But you find it most dramatically with the race of the victim. The court case that the United States Supreme Court took on that was really designed to end racial bias in the death pen to end the Death Penalty because of the evidence of race was all about race of the victim. The baldus study in 1987 established that in georgia youre 11 times more likely to get the Death Penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black. 22 times more likely to get the Death Penalty if the defendant is black and the victim is white. And these data could not be contradicted. And the United States Supreme Court didnt quibble with the data. They didnt say, we dont believe you. They simply held that the Death Penalty is constitutional because of two reasons. One, if we deal with racial bias in the administration of the Death Penalty, its gonna be just a matter of time before we start having to hear complaints about racial bias in other forms of the criminal Justice System. And Justice Brennan in his dissent ridiculed the court for its quote fear of too much justice. And he was right. The second thing was the thing that i think ought to haunt us, all of us. As the court said that a certain quantum of bias, a certain amount of discrimination in the administration of the american Death Penalty, a certain level of racial bias is inevitable. And because its inevitable, we cant do anything about it. This is the court that has equal justice under law engraved on its front. It is the court that produced brown vs. Board of education. Youve argued in front of the Supreme Court a number of times. To your knowledge, any of the justices who are making the decisions about the Death Penalty and its constitutionality, have they ever actually witnessed an execution . Oh, im certain they have not. I mean, the only justice who had any kind of personal relationship to the Death Penalty was thurgood marshall, who stood with condemned people, who represented condemned people. And, of course, he was passionately oppositional to the Death Penalty. I think part of the challenge that we have in this country is that weve created great distance between the people we put in jails and prisons and the rest of us. We build these prisons out in the middle of nowhere. We dont make them accessible. We make it really hard for people to get inside. Youve gotten inside a couple times. You talk about transparency, theres absolutely no transparency with the institutions of confinement and imprisonment in most of this country. And because of that, all we hear are the narratives about crime. And the politics of fear and anger have given rise to these policies like treating drug addiction as a crime rather than as a health issue. Ive represented people serving life without parole for stealing a bicycle. And i will tell you as you well know, that whenever you try to make decisions out of fear and anger, youre gonna do some things that are cruel and unjust. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. And we dont feel especially ashamed about that. You know, the Death Penalty, weve exonerated now 156 people. That means for every nine people weve executed, weve identified one innocent person on death row, who was proved innocent. Its a shocking rate of error. And yet, we just carry on. I mean, if for every nine planes that took off, one crashed and everybody died, the f. A. A. Wouldnt let anybody fly. And none of us would want to fly. To get them closer to the Death Penalty, cause they cant witness it. Its very difficult to get in and witness it. Ive witnessed it. Youve witnessed it. Tell em what its like. For me, the great violence of execution isnt really the moment when someones put in a chair and the electricity is turned on. That can be brutal and ugly and really graphic. Where its not the moment when we kind of push the needle and the toxins run through someones body. The real violence of the of the Death Penalty, for me, has been its in those moments, the hour before, when youre seeing someone whos healthy, whos not a threat to anyone, have to say goodbye to the people around him because the state says, we have to kill you. When i started working in alabama many years ago, had a bunch of people with execution dates, who didnt have lawyers. And the guy called me up and said, mr. Stevenson, i heard you opened an office. Ive got an execution date in 30 days. Will you take my case . And i started 30 days . 30 days. And i started saying, wait, wait, wait. We dont have books. We dont have staff. I dont have anything. Im not ready to take an execution case. And the guy got quiet. And he said, but i need a lawyer. And i said, im sorry. I cant. And then he hung up, which just broke my heart. Couldnt sleep that night. Came back the next day. And the guy called me again. He said, mr. Stevenson, i know what you said. He said, but im begging you, please take my case. He said, you dont have to tell me you can win. You dont have to tell me you can stop the execution. He said, but i dont think i can make it the next 29 days if theres no hope at all. And when he put it like that, i couldnt say no. So i said yes. Tried very hard to get a stay of execution. And one of the perversities of our system right now is that our courts are more committed to finality than fairness. Theyre just tryin to get to the end. While that mans alive, its not too late. Thats my view. And its never too late to do something corrective if we can identify the corrective thing that can be done. The court denied his stay motion. And i went down to be with him. And then i had a conversation with the client, who told me, he said, bryan, its been such a strange day. He said, more people have said, what can i do to help you . in the last 14 hours of my life than they ever did in the first 19 years of my life. And i was standing there holding that mans hands, thinking, yeah, where were they when you were three years old and your mom died . Where were they when you were six and seven being physically abused . Where were they when you were ten, being sexually abused . I know where they were after you went off to vietnam, got traumatized, and you came back in a really disrupted state. They were lined up to execute you when you committed this crime. And its that kind of understanding, it seems to me that teaches you something. And when youre up close, you do learn the reality, the brutality of it. If you said to people, lets rape people who are guilty of rape, youre probably not gonna get much support for that. And thats because we cant imagine how an otherwise healthy public official could be required to go rape someone as punishment. But we say, lets kill people who are guilty of murder. You know, lets do that. Its because we have this fantasy in our mind that we can actually kill people with impunity, that we can do it in a way that doesnt implicate us, where we dont feel like were playing a role in that. And if you cant reconcile it with rape and abuse and torture, then you shouldnt be able to reconcile it with murder. You talk about this somewhere, you say, a lot of people frame the Death Penalty as, like, do they have a right to live after what theyve done . and the question perhaps should be, do you have the right to kill . when you have a criminal Justice System where theres no diversity in the Decision Making roles, where politics plays a huge role in who gets to be the prosecutor and who gets to be the judge, where there is this indifference to the lives of some people, where we dont scrutinize the reliability of these convictions, where we make a lot of mistakes, then you dont deserve to kill. I always believe that you have to judge a nation and its character and its commitment to the rule of law, its civility, not by how it treats the rich and the powerful. Its how we treat the people who are in jails and prisons. Its how we treat the poor in the margins of our society that are the true reflection of who we are as a people. Still ahead, well talk about the people in our family who were murdered, and what our responses should be. Stay with us. This is talk to al jazeera. Im josh rushing. My guest this week is Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of equal justice initiative. Your grandfather was murdered . Yes my great grandmother was murdered in texas, in her 90s, by a Young African American Woman who was lookin for money for drugs. There was she thought my grandmother was blind. She thought the church bus was there to get her. Knock on the door. She opened it. Theres a scuffle. The girl goes to prison in texas. And while she was in, she got to complete a college degree. I think almost everyone before me and my family didnt get to go to college. And then they see the person who murders their beloved grandmother get to go to college. From a societal standpoint, i understand that. From a personal standpoint, i understand the pain and how that looks like unfairness. How would you explain to my family that situation . Yeah. Well, i mean, i think there is no right way to feel after you have lost someone you loved. I think it is wrong for any of us to have expectations that you have to feel a certain way or think a certain way. And what the rest of us ought to be thinking is, why did we allow this child to be roaming in this way, where she is preying on 90yearold blind people to meet a need . What kind of society have we created where people have that need . And can we do better . I think we can do better. And i want to disrupt all of the pathologies that put that child at that at your great grandmothers doorstep in the first place. And that means, yes, investing in education and, yes, reaching out to people who are otherwise going to suffer and struggle. It doesnt mean that were doing that, because we dont care about the victimization. Look, my grandfather was murdered. Same story. 86 years old, in a house, kids tryin to get money stabbed him to death. And theres a lot more violence and victimization in my family than id like than i like to even think about. But it what it makes me want to do is to create a nation thats less violent. I hate violence. Hate it, hate it, hate it. And if there was somethin you could do to change that narrative, where your great grandmother doesnt die, id want to do that. I want something that is responsive to inequality and injustice. And that is equality and justice. And if thats your orientation, then the world is just full of options. What does justice mean to you . Well, justice is a constant struggle. It is a commitment to doing the things that must be done to create fairness and equality and opportunity and compassion and hopefulness for everybody. So its not a one thing that we have to do right now. Its not a moment. It is a commitment. And so that justice thing means saying things like, you know, to the sharecroppers who were dispossessed of their land, who were forced to the urban north, you know what . We were wrong. Were sorry. And justice requires us to help you recover, in some fundamental way. The red lining that kept black vets after world war ii from experiencing the same movement into the middleclass that white vets were able to experience. How do i say im sorry about the lynchings . Or how do i say, im sorry about the red line . Well or how do i say im sorry that im sorry that when a cop approaches me, i say, hey, whats happenin pal . Havin a rough day . You know, like, oh, heres my license. Hows it goin today . Well, i think that we have to do it in a collective way. I mean, but one way you do it is that you dont vote for people that are tryin to sustain that same narrative that im talking about. Thats one thing you can do. Thats a very personal thing. You resist the rhetoric of fear and bigotry. And you start demonizing people and calling them rapists and things of that sort, because of their ethnicity, you say, no, not gonna have that. You dont celebrate that. So thats one thing you do. And then you support this effort, you know to kind of reshape the landscape. So you say, you know what . Im gonna go with the young kids of color, with the meet to the meeting, where were gonna talk to the police chief and say, how can we implement the 21st Century Task Force recommendations on policing which emphasize changing the identity of Police Officers in this country from warriors to guardians . And what does that mean . Im gonna be part of that conversation. And then you begin to think about the ways in which you challenge the manifestations of this narrative. So when people say, you know what . Lets do something remedial to help the survivors of terrorism and lynching that are now in urban ghettos. Lets invest, oh i dont know, half of the money that well save if we reduce the prison population by 50 . Lets imagine, you know, we spent 6 billion in 1980. We spent 80 billion last year on jails and prisons. Lets imagine we get the prison population cut in half. Thats 40 billion. So somebody might say, well, lets spend half of that 40 billion to help the poor in america recover. Lets invest in Mental Health services for the poor, Quality Services so that they have the same treatment for bipolar disorder and psychosis and schizophrenia that the affluent do. This is talk to al jazeera. When we come back what motivates stevenson to dedicate his career to helping the poor and the condemned. Im josh rushing and youre watching talk to al jazeera. Im speaking this week with acclaimed Public Interest lawyer and author of just mercy, Bryan Stevenson. I think about your life. You went to harvard. Not a cheap degree, right . Mm hmm you come out. Probably had an opportunity for some highpaying jobs. You go to the south, where youre not really from. Then you go to defend people that no one cares about down on death row in alabama. And then you defend the mentally ill. Then you defend children across america, 13 year olds, whove been given life without parole, all the way to the Supreme Court, multiple times, u. S. Supreme court. Why you . I think you grow up poor. You grow up in the segregated parts. And then people come in and change things for you. And you just begin to develop some consciousness that you owe something to somebody. And then, for me, it gets deeper, right . And i didnt appreciate this at the beginning when i went to harvard law school, id never met a lawyer. I didnt have any idea what lawyers did, really. I was just tryin to figure out how to stay in school. And i was really alarmed at the models of advocacy that i was being presented with until i met these lawyers down in the deep south who were animated by the work of defending people on death row. And that starts to kind of accumulate and accumulate. And for me, it just becomes an opportunity to do justice. And i think my whole life, when you experience injustice, when you feel like youre being treated unfairly, when you feel like youre being excluded unfairly, you want justice. And you want to do justice. My parents were humiliated on a regular basis, because of those signs that said white and colored. And they would carry that pain and anguish. And so you want to do justice. And weve taken down those signs largely. We dont lynch people in the same way that we used to. We dont have enslavement in the same way. But we still have injustice. And so i feel like im supposed to do something about injustice. And whether its a little tiny thing like just sitting with someone whos been victimized because of their race or their poverty or a big thing like arguing a case at the Supreme Court, they all feel the same to me. They may look big in one space and small in another, but they feel equally important. And for me, thats not, like, somethin i have to do. Its something i feel privileged to do. Bryan stevenson, thank you so much. Oh youre very welcome. Appreciate it. Yeah, youre welcome. There is so many changes in my life. I was ready for adventures. From burlesque dancer to acclaimed artists. Art saved my life. Reflections from her new memoir. No no no no no. Im way to dysfunctional to have an ordinary job. See what lies ahead for molly crabapple. Who emerges from life unscathed . I lived that character. We will be able to see change. Al jazeera welcome to the news hour live from our headquarters in doha. Coming up in the next 60 minutes the. The u. N. 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