Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, and author. Born in Milton, Delaware, in 1959, he studied at Eastern University and Harvard Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit organisation based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to people on death row and challenges racial injustice in the American criminal justice system. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) is Stevenson's memoir of his early years as a public interest lawyer fighting for death row inmates in Alabama, centered on the case of Walter McMillian, an innocent man sentenced to death. The book won the Goodreads Choice Award for Nonfiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the NAACP Image Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction in 2015, and was adapted into a 2019 film starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. Stevenson has won the MacArthur Fellowship, the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award, and dozens of honorary degrees. He is widely regarded as one of the most important voices on racial justice and the death penalty in the United States.