The margaret andob daniel foundation. Additional funding provided by Corporate Funding is provided by stevened inc. Welcome fing line. Thank you. You are the cofounder and Justice Initiative in equal montgomery, alabama. And you have won release for more tn 130 death row inmatess and hundr of other accused and have argued five cases in f ont of the Supreme Court the united states. Now, a hollywood vie, a major motion picture, is coming out about your life. Based on the book you wrote. I going to show you a clip of that movie. Well take a look. First time i vited death row, i wasnt expecting to meet ssomeone thee age as mean. Your life is still meaningful and im going to do Everything Possible to keep them from taking it. You dont know whatw youre to in alabama. Youre guilty from the moment youre born. Guard, were down here. Mr. Mcmillan,lalease. Jamie foxx there played walter mcmillan, an innocent mai wh sent jsed to death by a judge with a name none other thanobt e. Lee key. Yes. What happened with that case . Itseally fascinating case for a lot o reasons. Fit of all, it takes place in monroeville, alabama, which is the community where harper lee grew up in to kill a mockingbird andhat Community Celebrates that story, embraces that story. But when i got involved in walter mcmillans case, a black man wrusgfully a of killing a white woman, it was almost as if they couldnt ke the connection. He was miles from thehecrime,y vountded dozens of black people who could confirm his innocence and hege was l prosecuted because he had an affair with a young white woman, as a dangerous person. To see him he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole the jurys sentence of life and t imposed the Death Penalty and h spent the next years on death row for a crime he didnt commit. I got invved and was challenged by people who didnt th should represent someone like that. We got death threat, bomb threats. All kinds of efforts to y undermineuest to kind of overturn his conviction. And the fm gets to all of those details. At was interesting to me aboutbo it was the w in which we can have this idea about who we are mm a ity, as a nation, and not live out a those ideas values ine real tim when actual peoples lives are at risk. Thats what happened towa er. The outcome of to kill a mockingbird is a very different outcome that what happened with walter because of your legal work. It seems to me that kind of boers you. I think we havee all of these awards that are named after Atticus Finch and we celebrate that story. A lawyere l you. I dont want to be Atticus Finch. I dont think its enough to just stand with someone who is innocent and then t seem wrongly convicted and ultimately die from a lack of hope. I think we have to dema more, we have to expect more than just showinup. So for me, i wante peo who have been wrongly convicted and ned to win their freedom. I want our syste to do better than what it has done for too long you began this work sitting across the table from a man who was roughly your age, feeling utterly incapable of being able to muster what it was he needed. But what he needed ended up not being your Legal Expertise but what . I think what many people who live in the margins of our society need, whatany people who hav been disfavored and excluded and condemned need i they nee others to get close enough to recognize that theyre re than the worst thing they have ever done. To get close enough to undetand the nature ohe issues that have excluded, marginalized, disfored them. And yeah, i wastu a lawnt ruggling at harvard law schoho. I never met a lawyer until i got to law school. D i was really trying to find prisoners on georgias death row who were literally dying for Legal Assistance and seeing their humanity and seeing their need and their struggle for dignity really changed things for me in ways i didnt expect. And i became persuaded that its protecting the rights of the people who are mostha d, the most despised, the most disfavored, sometimes the most disjected and its the ultimate testf our rule of law. Thats where we can evaluate whether were prepared to be a just society, and that encounter really shaped things for me and changed things in wme that continued tohis time. You were played b michael b. Jordan. Dow does he . He was great. Im honored. Its ahrill to have someone asla po and celebrated as michael b. Playing me. I told him when he took on the role, he didnt have to get rid ofis blackla panther body to play me. And its been exciting to see the film come out and im exted for people to see it because its a way, again, of getting more people closer tois orld that we have created in america that often treats yof better youre rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Ahony is another man who you defended. He spent 30 years on death row for a murder in which moder ballistic science ended up demonstrating he was innocent. Thats right. He was alsoccused of two murders, actually, and couldnt get the expert help he nded when he was convicted and tried. And as a res of that, he was found guilty and put on death we row. Ot involved in the case in 1999. And i found the b it expertn the country to test the evidence. They quickly ckconcluded that t gun didnt matchhe bullets didnt match the gun obtained from his home so they were confident he was innocent. We just couldnt get anybody to pay tapgdz erngz to that. That is one of t cllenges with our Death Penalty today. We find a lot of error. Nt mr was the 156th person exonerated. Proved innocence after being sentenced to death. That meade for every nine people we have executed in this country, we ha identified one innocent person orn death row. Its a shocking rate of error. We wouldnt tolerate that err in most otherin areas of our lives. We wouldnt tolerate 1 out of 9 planes crashing fro a the sky everyone dying. And yet we tolerate it in the administraon of the Death Penalty. And thats the challenge that i see us facing. How has nda Forensic Technology changed the equation . I think they have had a huge impact. No question that dna in particular haselped us uncover wrongfulut convictionsts a small subset of the universe of convictions. A is most effective in cases where theres been Sexual Assault or biological evidence you can test. Thats a very small fraction of the kinds of cases that have sent many peopl to dth row or people to prison for life with no chance of paro. We are making ogress, but it wont aactual make difference if we dont create a different culture, if w dont have mindset thatt actually abhors wrongful convictions. That doesnt insulate our prosecuors and our policemen when they make mistakes. We have to create a whole new em of incentives. One of the things have heard you say is we dont deserve to kill. Mmhmm. What do you mean . I think the threshold question for the Death Penalty isnt do peoplpl deserve to die committed . Imes theyve i think thats the questionn lot of people focus e on. For me, estion is do we deserve to kill . Do we have a system that is sufficiently reliable, that we can entrust it with the ultimate power to take someones li a . Do weavystem free of bi against people of lor . Do we have a system that noolitical . Do we have a system that is going to be fair even whe w theres anger and frustration. Walter was largely convicted cause people were frustrated and angry that the prosecutor and police hadnt solved that crime. They did something they shouldnt have done, they coerced people to testify falsely against him, which resulted inroful conviction. A system vulnervule to those kikis o o pressures is one i dont thinkve des to kill. Ground zero is the 1987 supreme urt case, and in a 54 decision, the court affirmed the death pe that it was constitutional and it was Justice Powell who said apparent disparities in sentencing aren inevitable part of our criminal Justice System. When you hearr its inevitable, how do you feel in. Im heartbroken by it. I thinkat the united Supreme Court to concede to bias and the inevitable of Racial Discrimination is completely inconsistet with the co obligation to enforce the rule of law. Asmentioned, Justice Powell wrote the majority opinion. When he left the bench, when he retired, he was asked if the t were any opinions h h would lik to do ove, if h had any regrets. And mccluskey was one of the two cases that he idtified. Did he sayay why . He said he recognized now that he wasnt actually committing to the rule of law thth way he should have, and he regretted that decisn. Unfortunately, it was too late and we still live under the cloud. When youon say we deserve to kill, are there any circumances, really severe as circumstances, of mass murder, where the pertrator is im thinking Timothy Mcveigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. To me, its not about the offender and the violence. People do horrific things, and they have to be held accounble. I absolutely believe in accountability. I believe we have an obligation to protect people fro other who would try to harm us. We dont have to execute anavody. Y. But we the ability to confine and to imprison people without execution. For me, theisuestion , is there a system so free of bias that doesnt discriminatio against thor, that doesnt allow piticss to influence their decision making, and iee canthat system. I dt see that system. Youve been making that argument for man years now. Yo have even made it on firing line in the past. A youngerrian stevenson in 1994 argued,n participated debate on the merits of the death penenty and derits of thth Death Penalty and i would like to show you some of your arguments. Thetate oforgia, when a black defend is sentenced to death and 4 of the 12 jurors say that the ku klux klan do good things in the hecommunity, hat defense lawyer says i believe my client isic genly predisposed to commit crihys and thatsm comfortable with the sent bs. Thats racial bias. And that person is on death row today. Youre office is prosecuting him. You shouldnt stand up here and present like theres no racial bias in orgia. Do you think since 1994 as a country we have come a little closer to understanding the argument yve been making all tlong, that there is Racial Discrimination t plays into the present day . I think theres a growing recognition that the weight of our history is not somhing that we can continue to ignore. N have she Supreme Court, we have seen other institutions responding to dmatic evidence of discrimination, but for me, that is a consequence of work ginning. E just i think wre just staing to actually create a consciousness about howow were going to deal with long history of racial ineqlity. The work is referred to asrr ive work. What isiv narrative work . Your work has shifted from being on the front les of Legal Defense to narrative work. Yeah, its underneath the deba dete, underneath the topics you aear peoe talkingut there are narratives that shape the way we think. Stories. Stories,ut ideas, values. For example, in the 1970s and iates, were dec a misguided were drug addicted and drug who need our criminal Justice System to respond. We could have sa people with addiction and dependency have a Health Problem and we need our Health Care System too respond t that. The reason we made the crime choice is were think we have t that narrative because i a thin fe anger arere the essential ingredients of oppression and injustice. If you go anywhere in the world where people are abused ord, oppreshe oppressors will give you a narrative of fear and haanger. Thats was behind the genocide in anda, behind the holocaust. So the narrative has to shift. And so what were trying to do it comes to our hiory of when racial inequality. Were a postgenocide nation. What we did to native people when europeanshe came to contin t, we didnt call it that. We said native people were savages and used this narrative of rial difference. Those people are different, justify the vience. Andhat narrative is what then got us comfortle with two and a half centuries o slavery. I thinkre the evil, slavery was the narrative,a the ihat black people arent as good as white people. Theyre not fully human, not evolved. That ideology of white supmacy th emerged was the true evil. Thats why i argued slavery doesnt end in 1865. It just evolves. That means we have work to do. One thing youre doihe to with that work is you built and founded the Legacy Museum in healabama. And Legacy Museum helps to tell the story fromo slavery lynching to segregation to mass incarceration. And i think of tho four components, people are very familiar with three of them. But that lynching was such critical part in between slavery an segregation. Very eye opening. Its part ofs our history tht we almost never talk about. We go from the civil war t the civil right era as if Nothing Happened in enbetween. N fact it was a really dark period in American History where thousands of black people were pulled out of their homes and beaten and drowned and hanged. Terrorized. Black people were 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 thatenturyea isy critical to understanding where we are in america today. Reated a memorial that tells the story. We have beeno trying t create a new iconography. We want to put up markers. We want topt dis the silence. We actual send people, community members, to go to the sites. Them to dig soil at the lunching site and put them in the with the names of lynching victims with the dates of the lynchings. And we have those jars on display in our museum it becomes a tangible way to give honor and meaning t the lives of thousands of people who were victims of the terror and represented a abandonment of our commitment to the rule of the democratic geography of today is shaped by that era because we have millionsf black people in cleveland and chicago, detroit and los angeles, and oakland, who didnt go to those comnities as immigrants. They went to those cmunities as rugees and exiles in the American South. Knowledge, that understanding, t and we use things like the jars of soilnd the monuments and our memorials and the stories oo survivors create a new relationship. And a new relationship witho hi that tells the history that we can understand the history in order to rea ry accept t history. And on some level apologime for art of it. Recover, repair the damage. I really doieve that theres Something Better waiting for us in this countr i think theres something that feels mor like freedom and equality than what we have experienced. We cant get there unless were willing to commit to a process of truth and repair. Truth and justice. Truth and reconciliation. For me, those things are sequential. You have to tell the truth beforeou get t reconciliation or repair or justice. Thats what were trying to facilitate. Sometimes people hear me talking about history and they think i nt to punish america. I have no interest in punishing america. My interest is innes liberation i come from a faith tradition where redemption and restoration and repair comes after concession and repentance. You cant skip t t consaying part just to get to the redemption part. Llectively as a nation, we need to think about that. Thats what happened in south africa after apartheid. Thats what happened in hrwanda germany, but inhis country, we havent mad that contribution. By Michelle Obama in 2016 when e she addrereed the Democratic National alconinvestigation. Where would like to show you what she said. I wake unip every m in a house that was built by slaves. Beautiful, intelligent, black young women, playing with their dog on the white house lawn. And yet, not all reactions to that were the same. Yeah. Here was commentary from conservative quarters, from different parts of the funtry, thnkly tried to identify that the white house had been built by sles. One commentator even said the slaves were well fed and p in safe and s srdy lodging. Yeah. You know, for me, that wasa suc powerful moment in American History, to see anri namerican woman giving voice to this reality. But were so unpracticed in tauring truthfully about hiory. Its not a surprise that it was met with dirision and criticism. We have been practicing silence for a really lg time when you disrupt silence, people they get anxious. But its exactly how we recover. Its ectly how we make progress. Someel people ike we dont hat the capacity to talk honestly about what happened to native people and to talk honestly aboutlavery a lynching and segregation. I think those people underestimate the power of this co to survive. The power of the people in this couny to overcome. And i just think we are doubting what it really means to be a allow ourselveso avoid these to hard conversations that need to be ha you say the opposite of verty is not wealth, its juice. I amt peraded t sometimes we talk too much about money in america. I really do believe that the opopsite of poverty isnt wealth. I believe the opposite of poverty is stice. We have generational poverty. My dadpo was a smart person. He was hard he was really, really dedicated to the things he did. He couldnt goo high school because of unjust racial bias. And therefore didnt have the opportunities that ive had. If we had donee, juste could have actual created opportunities for him so we didnt have to grow up poor. Thats what i mean,hashen we challenge the unjust structures and systems, when we dont allow people to reach their full potential because were putting barriers in and boundaries that are shaped by unjust practices, we give rise to the kind o