Additional funding is provided by. Corporate funding is provided by. Welcome to firing line,n brevenson. Thank you. You are the cofounder and the executive director 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 cas in front of the Supreme Court of the uted states. Now a hollywood movie, a major motion picture, is coming out about your life based on the booyou wrote, just mercy. Im going to show you a clip of that movie. Lets take a loost the fime i visited death row, i wasnt expecting to meet somebody the same age as me. Your life is still meaningful, and im gonna do everying possible to keep them w taking it. You dont kat youre into down here in alabama, where youre guilty from thet youre born. Guard. Mr. Mcmillian. Were done here. Mr. Mcmillian, please. You sawamie foxx there, who plays Walter Mcmillian. Yes. An innocent man who is sentenced to death by a judgee with a n other than robert e. Lee key. Yes. What happened with that case . Its a really fascinating case for a lot of reason first of all, it takes place ty monroeville, alabama, which is the commu where harper lee grew up and wrote the beloved novel to kill a mockingbird. And that Community Celebrates that story. They embrace that story. Th romanticized that story. But when i got involved in Walter Mcmillians case, a black man wrongfully accused of killing a young white woman, it was almost as if they couldnt make e connection. He was actually miles ndom the crime when the crime took place, surr by dozens of black people who could confirm his innocence. And he was largely prosecuted because he had had an affair y withng 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 overrode the jurys verdict of life and imposed the Death Penalty. And he spent the next six yes on death row for a crime he didnt commit. I got involved d was really challenged by people who didnt think i eould represent someone l that. We got death threats. We got bomb threats. There were allinds of efforts to undermine my quest to kind of overturn his conviction. And the film gets into all of those details. Er but what was iting to me about it is the way in which we can have this idea about who 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, and thats what happened to Walter Mcmillian. The outcome o to kill a mockingbird is a very different outcome than at happened with Walter Mcmillian because of your legal work, and it sms to me that that sort of bothers you. Well, i think i you know, we have all of these awards that are named after atticus finch, and we celebrate tt story as a lawyer like you. Yeah. But who didnwin acquittal for his defendant. I dont want to be atticus finch. I dont think its enough to just stand with someone who is innocent and then see tm wrongly convicted and ultimately die from a lack of hope. I think we have to demand more. We have to expect mo than just showing up. And so, for me, i want people who had been wrongly convicted and condemned to win their freedom. I want our system to dbetter than what it has done for too long. Hi you beganwork sitting across the tab from a man who was roughly your age, feeling utterly incapable of being able tousr what it was that he needed. But what he needed ended up not being your legal expertise, but buthat . I think what many people who live in the margins of our society need, what many people o ha been disfored a excluded and condemned need is they need oths to get close enough to recogni 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,in maized, and disfavored them. Lid, yeah, i was a law student stru at harvard law school. Id never met a lawyer until i got to law school, and i was really trying to find my path, and meeting condemned prisoners on georgias death row,wh were literally dying for legal assistance, and seeing their humanity and seeing their need and their struggle for dignity really changed things for me ways that i didnt expect. And i became persuaded that its protecting the rights of the people who are most hated, most despised, most disfavored, sometimes most rejectedti that is the te test for our commitment to the rule of law. Thats where we can evaluate whether were truly prepared to be a just society. And that encounter really shaped things for me and changed things for me in ways that he continued to thiday. You are played by michael b. Jordan. Mmhmm. How does he d he does great. Im really flattered and honored. T its kind ofill to have somebody as popular and as celebrated as michael b. Playing me. I told him, when he took on the role, dy didnt have to get rid of his black panther when he played me, and [chuckling] he seemed to honor that a bit. So its been really exciting to see, you know, the film come out, and im excited for people to see it becauth k its a way, again, of getting more people closer to this world that we 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 you defended. He spent 30 years on death row for a murder in which modern ballistic science ended up demonstrating that e was innocent. Thats right he was also accused of two murders, tactually, and couldnt g expert helhe needed when he was convicted and tried. And as result of that, he was found guilty and put on death row. We got involved in the case in 1999, and i found the be experts in the country to test this evidence. They quickly concluded that the gun didnt match thunbullets didnt match the that had been obtained from his home. And so they were very confident that he has he wacent. We just couldnt get anybody to Pay Attention to that. And i do think thats one of the challenges with our Death Penalty today. We tolate a lot of error. Mr. Hinton was the 156th person exonerated, proved innocent after being sentenced to death. Mewere now over 160, whics that, for every nine people weve executed in thntry, 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 touch one, will kill you, no one would sell apples. We wouldnt toleratein one out ofplanes crashing from the sky and everyone dying, and yet we tolate it in the administration of the Death Penalty, and ths the challenge that i see us facing. How has dna and Forensic Technology changed the equation . I think its had a huge impact theres no question that dna, in particular, has helped us uncover wrongful convictions, but its a smallubset of the large universe of wrongful convictions. Dna is typically most effecte 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 have 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 crea a different culture. If we dont have a mindset that actually abhors wrongful conviction, that doesnt insulateos our utors and our police when they make mistakes. Weve got to create a whole new system of incentives in our criminal Justice System. So one of the things ive heard you say is, we dondeserve to kill. Mmhmm. Mmhmm. What do you what do you mean . Well, i thinkre the old 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. T, or me, the question is, do we deserve to kill . Do we have a system at is sufficiently reliable that we can entrust it with thultimate power to take someones life . Do we have a system thats free of bias against people of cor . A system thats nonpolitical . Fa we have a system that is going to b even when theres anger and fr Walter Mcmillian was largely convicted because people were frustrated and angry that the psecutor and the police hadnt solved that crime. And with that kind of pressure, they did something that they shouldnt have done they coerced people to testify falsely against him, which resulted in a wrongful conviction. And a system vulnerable to those kinds of preures is one i dont think deserves to kill. Grounzero for the Death Penalty at the Supreme Court is mccleskey vs. Kemp, right . Mmhmm. Pr the 17 e court case. And in a 54 decision, the court affirmed the Death Penalty that it was constitutional. And it was justiceewis powell who said apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our cminal Justice System. When you hear that iis inevitable. Mm. How do you hear that . Im im heartbroken by it. I thinfor the United States supreme cot to concede to bias and the inevitability ofacial discrimination is completely inconsistent with the courts obligation to enforce the rule of law. As you mentioned, Justice Powell ote the majority opinion. And when he left the bench, when he retired, he waasked if there were any opinions he would like to do over, if he had any regrets, and cleskey was one of the two cases that he identified. Id he say why . He said he recognized now thate wasnt actually committing to the rule of law the way he should ve. D he regretted that decision. But, unfortunately, it was too latewe antill live under the cloud created by mccleskey. When you say that we nt deserve to kill, are there any circumstances really severe circumstances, cases of mass murder where the perpetrator is is clear . Im thinking of timothy mcigh and the Oklahoma City bombings. To me, its not about the offender and the violence. There are people do horrific things, and they have to be held accountable. I absolutely believe in accountability. I believe that we have an obligation to protect people tofrom others who would tr harm us. We dont have to execute anybody, though. Th we havability. Uhhuh. To confine and to imprison people without execution. For me, the question is, is there a system f e of bias that doesnt pscriminate against the poor, that doesnt allitics to influence the way decisionmaking happens, m and i cant see that sys i dont see that system. Youve been making that argument for many years now. Yes. Youve even made it on firing line in the past. [ laughs ] a young Bryan Stevenson in 1994 argued participated in a debate on the merits of the Death Penalty and the demerits of the Death Penalty with william f. Buckley jr. , and i would like to show you. O [ chucklingy. 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 that the ku klux klan do good things in that community, when that defense lawyer says that, i believe my client is genetically predisposed to commit violent crimes, and thats w im comfortable with his death sentence. When the trial judge and the prosecutor refer to that black defeant as colored boy throughout the trial, thats racial bias. And that person is on death row today. And your office is prosecutingin him, tto 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 do think theres a growing recognition that the weight of our history is nothing that we can continue to ignore. Weve seen the Supreme Court, and weve seen other institions responding to dramatic evidence of bias and discrimination. T, for me, that is a consequence of work w thre just beginning. I think were just starting to actually create a consciousness about how we are going to deal with this long historyli of racial ineq. So this work is referred to as narrative work. Yes. What is narrative work . I mean, your work has shiftedkn from, yo, being on the front lines of Legal Defense to narrative work. Can you explain thateao us . Its underneath the debates, underneath the topics that you hear peopleng about, there are narratives that actually shape the y stories. Stories, but ideas, values. So, foexample, in ninet in the 1970s and 80s we declaredsg a ded war on drugs. We said that people who are drugaddicted and drugdependent are criminals, and we need our crimin Justice System to respond to that crisis. We could have said that people wi addiction and dependenc have a health problem, and we need our Healthcare System to respond to that. The reason why we made the crime choice was because we were being goveed by what i call the politics of fear and anger. It was a narrative that we had to be tough on crime, that people who dont do exactly what we want them to do are criminals, and we use that narrative to justify these extreme punishments. Ed i think we have to cha that narrative because i think fear and anger are the essential ingredients of oppression and injustice. If you go anywhere in the world where people are abu or oppressed, the oppressors will give you a narrative of fear and anger. At what was behind the genocide in rwanda. Ths what was behind the holocaus 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. Were a postgenocide nation. What we did to native people when europeans came to this continent was a genocide. We didnt call it thatwe becausaid that native people were savages, and we use this narrative 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. Th and i thingreat evil of american slavery wasnt involuntary servitude and forced labor it was the narrative, the idea that black people arent as gool as white p theyre not fully human, theyre not evolved that ideology of White Supremacy that erged from that narrative was the true evil, and thats why ive argued tha slavery doesnt end in 1865 it just evolves. An that means we have work to do. So you one of the things youre doing in order to help with that work is youve built and founded the Legacy Museum in alabama. Yeah. And the Legacy Museum helpto tell the story, from slavery to lynching to segregation mass incarceration. And i think, of those four components, people are very fami with three of them. Mmhmm. But that lynching was such a such a critical part in between slaveryse anegation. Yes. Is very eyeopening. Its part of our history that weve almost never talout. 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 period in american history, where thousands of black people were pulled out of their homes and beaten and drowned and murdered and hanged. Millions of black people were terrorized. 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 erally critical to understanding where we are in amica today. So we created a memo that tells the story. We have been trying to create a new iconography. An weto put up markers at every lynching site in america. We want to disrupt the silence. Anso we actually send people, Community Members to go to the sites, and wask them to dig soil at the lynching site. And we put them in jars with the names of those lynching victims, with the dates of those lynchings. And 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 victims of error and violence that really represents an abandonment of our commitment to the rule of law, and the demographic geography today is shaped by that era becauswe have millions of black people in cleveland and chicago and detroit and los angeles and oakland who didnt go to those communitiesnt as immig they went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South,e and weying to recover that knowledge, that understanding, and we use tngs like the jars of soil and the monuments and our memorialth anstories of survivors to create a new relationship to this history. And a new relationship to the history that tells the history so that we can understan the history in order to really accept the history. Yeah. And then, on some level, apologize for some part of it. Recover, repair the damage. I really do believe that theres something betterr waiting in this country. 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 truthth and repair tnd justice, truth and reconciliation. And for me, those things are sequential. You got to tell thtruth fore you get to reconciliation or repair injustice, and thats what re trying to facilitate. And sometimes people hear me talking about this history, isd theyhink i want to p america for the system. I have no interest in punishment. My interest is iliberation. You know, i come from a faith tradition where our redemption and restoration and repair comes after confession and repennce, and you cant skip the confessing part just to get to the r