Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to
Speaker 1: hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change
Speaker 1: their careers, what relationships influenced their work. A recent New
Speaker 1: Yorker magazine article told the story of Chanelle Jackson and
Speaker 1: Alabama jury found Jackson guilty of murder old Twelve jurors
Speaker 1: voted against sending him to the electric chair, but Alabama
Speaker 1: is one of three states where a judge can override
Speaker 1: the jury's decision, and the judge, who was up for
Speaker 1: re election that year, did just that. Chanel Jackson was
Speaker 1: sentenced to death. Eventually, Jackson acquired a new lawyer, Brian Stephenson,
Speaker 1: who is my guest today. Evenson is founder and director
Speaker 1: of the Equal Justice Initiative, and Alabama based nonprofit that
Speaker 1: fights for retrials, death sentence reversals, and exonerations. Stevenson is
Speaker 1: a fierce opponent of judicial override and works against the
Speaker 1: penalty system. He says is defined by error, bias, and unreliability.
Speaker 1: Our sentences for virtually every offense are way way out
Speaker 1: of control. It's not just the death penalty in life
Speaker 1: without parole. It's ten years for simple possession of marijuana.
Speaker 1: It's you know, fifteen years for writing a bad check.
Speaker 1: It's all of that stuff. And I absolutely believe that
Speaker 1: people saw what I saw. They could not be comfortable,
Speaker 1: they could not be siglent, they could not continue doing
Speaker 1: what we're doing without having to do something. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's been a time in our American history where
Speaker 1: there are more innocent people in jails and prisons than
Speaker 1: right now. You know, we have this tremendous prison increase.
Speaker 1: Three people in nineteen seventy two, two point three million today.
Speaker 1: There's no way to avoid the fact that whatever the
Speaker 1: proportion of innocent people that are being wrongly convicted, and
Speaker 1: it's high because of this increase in the number of
Speaker 1: people being sent to prison, We've never had as many
Speaker 1: innocent people in jails and prisons than we have today.
Speaker 1: And people read about innocent people getting out for the
Speaker 1: first time. The Innocence Project and DNA is something the
Speaker 1: important work all of those folks, but it's a fraction
Speaker 1: of the innocence population. They're dealing with, just that small,
Speaker 1: very small group of people whose crimes allow for biological
Speaker 1: evidence that can be tested which will exonerate them. That's
Speaker 1: a two of the innocent population, and it will haunt you.
Speaker 1: I've been representing a man named Anthony ray Hinton. So
Speaker 1: this is a case of a man who in was
Speaker 1: accused of two different murders. There were three fast food
Speaker 1: robberies in Birmingham and the police couldn't figure out who
Speaker 1: did it. They collected the bullets. They thought that the
Speaker 1: bullets might have been fired from the same weapon. And
Speaker 1: the third crime, the witness didn't die. The victim didn't die,
Speaker 1: and he went through a photo lineup and he picked
Speaker 1: out this guy, Anthony bray Hinton, who had no prior
Speaker 1: history of violent crimes. So they go to his mother's house.
Speaker 1: They find an old gun and they test the gun.
Speaker 1: They said, well, this is the gun that produced all
Speaker 1: these bullets, and based on that, they charge him with
Speaker 1: all of the murders. He goes to trial. He says,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I have a lock solid alibi. I
Speaker 1: was fifteen miles away in a warehouse at the time
Speaker 1: of this third crime, and there's twenty people who can
Speaker 1: confirm that he was there. But now they're locked in
Speaker 1: to him. So they're not going to kind of be
Speaker 1: dissuaded by that. They put on their experts who say, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the gun that fired all of these bullets.
Speaker 1: Because he's poor, he didn't have any money for a
Speaker 1: good weapons expert, so his lawyer had to get a
Speaker 1: civil engineer who never testified in this kind of case,
Speaker 1: who was blind in one eye, who couldn't actually turn
Speaker 1: on the machine, who has literally laughed off the stin convicted,
Speaker 1: sentenced to death, he's been on death row for twenty
Speaker 1: eight years, fifteen years ago. We get involved, we get
Speaker 1: the best experts in the country. They all say, no
Speaker 1: way in the world this gun produced these ros. Well,
Speaker 1: the state says, we're not going to back down, and
Speaker 1: they says, well, we don't have an answer to what
Speaker 1: these experts are saying, but we've got a conviction in
Speaker 1: the death sentence and we're just going to run with that,
Speaker 1: and every cours more expedient for them, and it's more
Speaker 1: effective and politically because if they have to say, you
Speaker 1: know what, we made a mistake, then people start to
Speaker 1: ask questions. In the article in the Channel Jackson case,
Speaker 1: you read about how all these judges who are running
Speaker 1: for office absolutely and we're getting contributions from prosecutors who
Speaker 1: are trying cases before everybody toughens up about the law
Speaker 1: that they almost act in a different ways. Absolutely, we
Speaker 1: have elected judges. They run as partisan and partisan elections.
Speaker 1: You run as a Democrat or a Republican and you
Speaker 1: campaign on your toughness. And so to actually acknowledge that
Speaker 1: there's a problem with the death punty suggests that the
Speaker 1: death penalty isn't a reliable It creates a political vulnerability.
Speaker 1: We've been litigating for fifteen years. So just last year February,
Speaker 1: we got the United States Supreme Court to overturn the conviction.
Speaker 1: And I'm now kind of each day trying to get
Speaker 1: this man out of prison. But it wakes me up
Speaker 1: at it just so burdened me. And the thing I
Speaker 1: just went to see this client last week, Mr twenty
Speaker 1: eight years you know, and this he's a remarkable person.
Speaker 1: But when when also knowing that by admitting they were wrong,
Speaker 1: how much they would win? Yeah, absolutely, as you wind
Speaker 1: up having the purity and the dignity of the office
Speaker 1: elevated by them. You know, sometimes we make mistakes. I'm
Speaker 1: really sorry I've made that argument. Let's give this guy
Speaker 1: a couple of million bucks to live his life in
Speaker 1: the remaining years of his life, and at this point
Speaker 1: we would just take freedom. But I've made that argument
Speaker 1: to every attorney general since I said, look, if you said,
Speaker 1: did you almost gain any ground with any of them?
Speaker 1: Were some of them close? They were all the same.
Speaker 1: They all acted at the first conversation like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. But when they thought about it
Speaker 1: more and they got into that political context, they all retreated.
Speaker 1: But I've said to each of them, if you say,
Speaker 1: we even evaluated this case and we've concluded that this
Speaker 1: one is innocent, you gain credibility. Your ability to kind
Speaker 1: of do the stuff is actually enhanced. But they can't
Speaker 1: even do that, and so yes, that will haunt you.
Speaker 1: Is there's something about the d NA no pun intended
Speaker 1: of the prosecutors mistake? Well, I do. I think throughout
Speaker 1: our country we've been acculturated into believing that you never
Speaker 1: back down, you never never absolutely, and I think actually
Speaker 1: as a country that's our biggest problem. We have become
Speaker 1: unwilling to acknowledge that we make mistakes. What we do
Speaker 1: is tell people around the world how great we are.
Speaker 1: That's right, and that arrogance actually sets us up for
Speaker 1: the kind of conflicts that then follows. You know, this
Speaker 1: whole work we're doing on race and poverty is actually
Speaker 1: rooted at trying to persuade America that actually we need
Speaker 1: to just own up to all of the terrible things
Speaker 1: we've done and have a conversation about it. Be truthful
Speaker 1: to have an almost South African reconciliation. Absolutely, that's what
Speaker 1: we're trying to do. Actually, we've been doing this stuff
Speaker 1: on slavery. We're about to issue this report on lynching,
Speaker 1: which dominated from the end of reconstruction into World War Two.
Speaker 1: My whole view is that, you know, if you come
Speaker 1: to the South, we like to romanticize the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: put up all these Confederate mon mento memorials, And the
Speaker 1: truth of it is, in America and we were in
Speaker 1: a society with slavery, we became a slave society. We
Speaker 1: actually created a myth and ideology that allowed slavery to
Speaker 1: be defensible. These people of color are different, they're not
Speaker 1: as smart, they don't work as hard, blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: and the Thirteenth Amendment didn't do anything to address that myth.
Speaker 1: And in that respect, slavery didn't end, it evolved, it
Speaker 1: turned into something else, and we had decades of terrorism.
Speaker 1: And these older people come up to me because they
Speaker 1: get angry when people start talking about nine eleven is
Speaker 1: the first time we're dealing with terrorism, because they feel
Speaker 1: implicated by that. They said, we grew up with terrorism,
Speaker 1: We had to worry about being lynched and bombed and threatened,
Speaker 1: and that legacy terrorism, if it's against someone else, that's
Speaker 1: exactly right, and that legacy we're doing in other countries
Speaker 1: is in terrible all right, exactly, and we haven't actually
Speaker 1: recognized our capacity to actually engage in terrorism. And I
Speaker 1: want to be very careful. I've learned to be hyper
Speaker 1: careful about these things because if this goes out over
Speaker 1: the year, I don't want people to the street. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying every act of the U. S Military and
Speaker 1: the soldier is an act of terrorist. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: there are things that resemble terrorists. And I never blamed
Speaker 1: the soldiers that the government has ordered done well, it's
Speaker 1: just our attention to where the lines are. If we're
Speaker 1: thinking about where the lines are and recognizing that we
Speaker 1: can go pass those lines, if we're not paying attention
Speaker 1: to those lines. That's all we're trying to talk about here.
Speaker 1: And there's no question that lynchings were terrorism. Public spectacle
Speaker 1: lynchings in the nineteen hundreds, in the early part of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century were terrorism, and they sent thousands millions
Speaker 1: of African Americans into communities like New York and Boston
Speaker 1: and Chicago and Detroit, in Oakland and Los Angeles, not
Speaker 1: as people looking for opportunities, but as exiles and refugees
Speaker 1: from terror. And that legacy of being terrorized by oh
Speaker 1: I absolutely do shape the way these communities emerged. And
Speaker 1: we never kind of talked about it. You couldn't get
Speaker 1: Congress to actually pass an anti lynching law because the
Speaker 1: Suntherners were saying, no, we will not back down from this.
Speaker 1: And even during the Civil rights movement, and this is
Speaker 1: part of where I get in trouble because I'm a
Speaker 1: little provoked by how all we want to do when
Speaker 1: we talk about the nineteen forty and fifties and sixties
Speaker 1: is celebrate the civil rights movement, to celebrate the progress
Speaker 1: that we made and free it. If everybody gets to celebrate,
Speaker 1: there are no qualifying questions that you have to add
Speaker 1: answer before you get to participate, and we've reduced it
Speaker 1: almost to this kind of three day event where Rosa
Speaker 1: Parks gives up her seat on the first day. Dr
Speaker 1: King leads a march on Washington on the second day,
Speaker 1: and then we pass all these laws on the third day.
Speaker 1: And it provokes me because we're ignoring the decades of
Speaker 1: damage that we did to everybody by humiliating people of
Speaker 1: color every day of their life. I grew up in
Speaker 1: a community where I saw my parents humiliated every day
Speaker 1: of their life. The damage we did in southern Delaware
Speaker 1: on the Eastern Shore, where the movie theaters were segregated,
Speaker 1: where the schools were second, I started my what did
Speaker 1: you see, Well, I started my education in a colored school.
Speaker 1: I would drive past the Milton Public School and see
Speaker 1: all the white kids going to this big, beautiful brick building,
Speaker 1: and then we would go into this shack and I
Speaker 1: would go to the beach. Where are the best parts
Speaker 1: of the beach. We couldn't go to because they were
Speaker 1: racially segregated. I didn't like movies when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: caring in the sixties. Yeah, I didn't like movies because
Speaker 1: you had to sit in the back. It was such
Speaker 1: a humiliating experience. And then after integration with the schools,
Speaker 1: I'd see my friends, but I couldn't be with them
Speaker 1: in some of these other spaces until there was complete desegregation,
Speaker 1: and it hurts. I used to get mad at my
Speaker 1: parents for not taking me to town because we lived
Speaker 1: out in the country there's nothing to do, but they
Speaker 1: didn't want me to go with them in town because
Speaker 1: they didn't want me to see them humiliated by any
Speaker 1: white person that they encountered. And it accumulates these injuries,
Speaker 1: this burden, this problem, and we haven't talked about it.
Speaker 1: And even for white people, a generation of whom were
Speaker 1: taught that they are better than other people because of
Speaker 1: their skin color, we haven't helped them recover from that
Speaker 1: lie because we just tried to play it off. And
Speaker 1: we needed truth and reconciliation after nine and we didn't
Speaker 1: do it. And because of that, we've now set ourselves
Speaker 1: up for the conflicts and controversies that were still experiencing,
Speaker 1: where the police are the face of this racial order,
Speaker 1: and this presumption of guilt haunts us and follows all
Speaker 1: these young people called. The Bureau of Justice is now
Speaker 1: reporting that one in three black male babies born in
Speaker 1: the twenty one century is expected to go to jail
Speaker 1: or prison. That wasn't during the twentieth century, wasn't during
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. It became it's only getting worse, and
Speaker 1: it's well, I think it's because we've never confronted this
Speaker 1: presumption of guilt, which is a result well, I think
Speaker 1: it's a result of this racial narrative that has existed
Speaker 1: for so long that we're not actually proactively trying to
Speaker 1: do that. So there were many people who, first of all,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna use some phrases I'm not really comfortable with,
Speaker 1: because when you hear people say let's continue the conversation,
Speaker 1: let's be part of the it makes me want to
Speaker 1: vomit because I'm sick of convert We've had quite a
Speaker 1: bit too much conversation action. But my point is to
Speaker 1: to borrow those words, you know, in the conversation, if
Speaker 1: you will. A lot of people assuming there were saying,
Speaker 1: let's let's take race out of this now. If you
Speaker 1: if you notice something like my criticisms of Obama have
Speaker 1: nothing to do with race. But but you come roaring
Speaker 1: in with with the with the racial question, you can't.
Speaker 1: It is a defining feature of American life. It has
Speaker 1: so kind of compromised. But you tag, but do you
Speaker 1: think it's changed? And I will tell you what, tell
Speaker 1: you why. To me, America was always the big table.
Speaker 1: There was bounty at the table, and there were jobs.
Speaker 1: And this is a metaphor for the jobs and the
Speaker 1: money and the housing and the lifestyle and the cars
Speaker 1: and the vacations. And over the last fifty years, there's
Speaker 1: less seats at the table. And now there's still more
Speaker 1: seats at this table, and it's still a great table.
Speaker 1: That the trick became in order to keep the critical
Speaker 1: massive American satisfied. We had to make sure that a
Speaker 1: lot of people didn't even get near the table. And
Speaker 1: I thinks about economics, it's not about race. Well, I
Speaker 1: believe that racism has has metastasized into really what is
Speaker 1: an economic question? We were going to use color as
Speaker 1: an excuse to keep you off the playing field and
Speaker 1: keep you from competing because there's not enough at the
Speaker 1: seats at the table anymore. Well, I don't think we
Speaker 1: can separate race and economics. I mean the slavery about
Speaker 1: the economic viability of this new generational people would come
Speaker 1: to this great Land and how to make it profitable.
Speaker 1: And we got people enslaved here, not because we thought
Speaker 1: we were doing something proactive to help Africans, but because
Speaker 1: we had these economic needs, We had these labor needs.
Speaker 1: And the same is true in post reconstruction. You know,
Speaker 1: Convict Leasing and Jim Crow and all of these institutions
Speaker 1: were about helping people stay profitable, helping them stay secure.
Speaker 1: And even the nineties and fifties and sixties it had
Speaker 1: these social features, but there were real economic tensions there.
Speaker 1: So I think for people of color and poor people,
Speaker 1: they were always in another room too. When we talk
Speaker 1: about that table, we let some people of color get
Speaker 1: in there enough to take this exactly, but it's always
Speaker 1: been this still in their absolutely. To get back to
Speaker 1: this point I'm making, and that is that I believe
Speaker 1: that there's two hierarchies here. One is people in power politically,
Speaker 1: and then there's the uh, the power of the masses
Speaker 1: of people who I mean, to me, my daughter, my
Speaker 1: eldest daughter, has grown up since nineteen in a wash
Speaker 1: intolerance and cultural equality. These are kids who they know
Speaker 1: the name of Kanye West's baby, and they don't know
Speaker 1: who their senator is, and a celebration of all things
Speaker 1: black in culture, fashion, They worship Beyonce. They are completely
Speaker 1: color blind black, white, music, sports, culture, what have you.
Speaker 1: They worship and they don't and they don't see that,
Speaker 1: and yet still more black people are going to prison.
Speaker 1: Well that's where's that disconnect. Well, I think it's because
Speaker 1: it's become culturally complicated, but I don't think the fundamentals
Speaker 1: have really changed. I go to a gym in Alabama
Speaker 1: where I see these young guys firefighters, police officers that
Speaker 1: I used to go to. Different I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: different time. I don't go to that gym anymore. But
Speaker 1: these young white guys who are listening to rap artists,
Speaker 1: they're listening to Kanye, they're listening to Beyonce, but they
Speaker 1: have Confederate American tattoos. And when they enforce when they
Speaker 1: work as police officers and they see young black men,
Speaker 1: they presume they're guilty, they presume they dangerous, they presume
Speaker 1: that they're up to something, and they target them and
Speaker 1: they've victimized them. At the same time that they are
Speaker 1: persuaded that they couldn't possibly be racially biased because they
Speaker 1: like Kanye and they like Beyonce. And that cultural narrative
Speaker 1: has always existed, right, people would go to the movies
Speaker 1: in the first half of the century and watch black
Speaker 1: performers acting roles that comforted them and feel like that
Speaker 1: somehow made them beyond race. But in truth, they bought
Speaker 1: into the same narrative of racial difference. They bought into
Speaker 1: the same idea that these uh, these barriers that kind
Speaker 1: of are are really condemning and condemned and and harp,
Speaker 1: you know, and just really disrupting the lodge of the poor,
Speaker 1: and people of color didn't have any implications for them.
Speaker 1: They didn't have to apologize for anything. And I think
Speaker 1: that reality is still there. And you know, you don't
Speaker 1: have to be an overt rate, you don't have to
Speaker 1: be bad, you can have all of these other things.
Speaker 1: You can even have good black friends and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: I'll tell your story. I was in a courtroom in
Speaker 1: the Midwest, just not not too long ago. It was
Speaker 1: it was actually a juvenile case, and was the first
Speaker 1: time I'd gone there. Was representing a young kid, a
Speaker 1: young white kid, asking when you say you're representing someone,
Speaker 1: how do they get you? Yeah, how does someone now?
Speaker 1: Ryan Stevenson twenty years ago was different. You can bring
Speaker 1: them up on the phone. How did they get you
Speaker 1: to show we we get hundreds of requests wedding well,
Speaker 1: we get hundreds of requests each week. We only represent
Speaker 1: a small portion of the people. But when we have
Speaker 1: a campaign, like when we were doing the juvenile work,
Speaker 1: trying to get the court to end life without parole
Speaker 1: sentences for kids, we were taking those cases and I
Speaker 1: took I want to stay active. I like being an
Speaker 1: active lawyer. So I took, you know, a small set
Speaker 1: of those and I would go to courts and went
Speaker 1: to South Dakota. I went to these states, Iowa, Indiana
Speaker 1: to do these hearings. I always have cases that I'm
Speaker 1: working on directly personally, even though there are much smaller
Speaker 1: subset than the people who request us. But I was
Speaker 1: in this courtroom in the Midwest, just getting ready for
Speaker 1: the hearing, had my suit on, had my shirt on,
Speaker 1: had my time, sitting at defense counsel's table. The judge
Speaker 1: walks in and he sees me sitting at defense counsel's table,
Speaker 1: followed by the prosecutor, and he looks over at me
Speaker 1: and he says, hey, hey, hey, you get out of here.
Speaker 1: I don't want any defendant sitting in my courtroom without
Speaker 1: their lawyers, you go back out there in the hallway
Speaker 1: and wait until your lawyer gets here. And I stood
Speaker 1: up and I said, oh, I'm sorry, your honor, I
Speaker 1: didn't introduce myself. My name is Brian Stevenson. I am
Speaker 1: the lawyer. And the judge starts laughing, and the prosecutor
Speaker 1: starts laughing, and I make myself laugh too, because I
Speaker 1: don't want to disadvantage my client. I'm laughing because I'm
Speaker 1: horrif it's horrifying. Right. Then the client comes in again,
Speaker 1: this young white kid. We do the hearing, but afterward,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in my car and I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: what is it about this judge that when he sees
Speaker 1: a middle age black man in a suit sitting at
Speaker 1: defense counsel's table, he can't imagine that that's the lawyer.
Speaker 1: And is that going to manifest? What what state was
Speaker 1: that in? This was actually in Iowa. Judge wasn't a
Speaker 1: bad guy. We actually had a good outcome, but it's
Speaker 1: the way it was. The outcome. Well, we got the
Speaker 1: client of reduced sense. He was one of the people
Speaker 1: who didn't end up with life without parole. But it's
Speaker 1: the way I ever mentioned again. Nope, nope, make your
Speaker 1: hands for any kind of even implied apology. I don't
Speaker 1: even think he worried about it. It was just to
Speaker 1: even aware. No, it was just funny, you know. And
Speaker 1: the truth of it is, though, when that judge is
Speaker 1: imposing sentences on young definitive color, their race is shaping
Speaker 1: his comfort level with putting them in prison forever. It's
Speaker 1: impacting the way he thinks about their guilt and the
Speaker 1: propriety of these very harsh sentences. And he can go
Speaker 1: home and go have dinner with some nice African American
Speaker 1: woman or man, and he can listen to this music.
Speaker 1: But that narrative has not. We have to do something
Speaker 1: proactive to actually shield ourselves from acting on these biases
Speaker 1: that have been going on for decades. You can bet
Speaker 1: that Stevenson, who was currently a law professor at New
Speaker 1: York University, is educating his students on this particular bias.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about the prison system
Speaker 1: in the United States, take a listen to my conversation
Speaker 1: with Martin Horn, former New York City Commissioner of Correction
Speaker 1: and Probation. He recommends big changes for our society. I
Speaker 1: would legalize drugs across the board. You would really legalize
Speaker 1: which draft all of them. You would legalize all dress.
Speaker 1: I would sell it in the liquor stores, right, and
Speaker 1: I would tax the hell out of it. Find Martin
Speaker 1: Horn in the archives that here's the thing. Dot org.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: My guest is Brian Stephenson, who has argued six cases
Speaker 1: before the U. S. Supreme Court. In two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: Stevenson gave a ted talk. He cited his grandmother as
Speaker 1: a big influence. He told a story of how one day,
Speaker 1: when he was nine, she took him aside and told
Speaker 1: him he wasn't like the other grandkids. He was special.
Speaker 1: She told him not to repeat their conversation and made
Speaker 1: him vow never to drink beer. When he was fourteen,
Speaker 1: his older brother offered him a beer, and Brian remembered
Speaker 1: his promise beer. I said, no, I don't feel right
Speaker 1: about that. You'll go ahead, y'all go ahead, And then
Speaker 1: my brother started staring at me. He said, what is
Speaker 1: what's wrong with you? Have some beer? Then he looked
Speaker 1: at me real hard. He said, Oh, I hope you're
Speaker 1: not still hung up on that conversation mama had with you.
Speaker 1: I said, well, what are you talking about? He says, Oh,
Speaker 1: Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special. Brian stuck
Speaker 1: with his grandmother. He still has never had a single drink.
Speaker 1: His TED talk has over two million views, and in
Speaker 1: the week after he gave it, Ted and the attendees
Speaker 1: of the talk pledged over one million dollars to Stevenson's organization,
Speaker 1: the Equal Justice Initiative. As a kid growing up in
Speaker 1: rural Delaware, Stevenson had no clue that any of this
Speaker 1: awaited him. I don't even have an awareness of what's
Speaker 1: possible for me. I'm just trying to get into school.
Speaker 1: Now what. Well, my dad was working in a food factory.
Speaker 1: You know. I had two siblings, an older brother thirteen
Speaker 1: months older and a sister eleven months younger. You know,
Speaker 1: we're just all crammed into this little space. I lived
Speaker 1: in this really poor world section chickens and pigs. People
Speaker 1: have outhouses. You know. We used to like using the
Speaker 1: outhouse because we thought it was cool. You yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's at least adventure. You know, you got your water
Speaker 1: from a well, and we were just trying to find
Speaker 1: a way to kind of be seen, you know. So
Speaker 1: I went and played was a musician, playing in the church.
Speaker 1: Lots of time in church, because it was the one
Speaker 1: place where you could say things, You could actually speak
Speaker 1: in front of a group of people, you could be heard.
Speaker 1: There was this identity that you could have there that
Speaker 1: you couldn't have in town, where you had to be
Speaker 1: small and invisible. My grandmother was actually the daughter of
Speaker 1: people who were enslave. Her parents were born in Virginia
Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties. She was born in the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1: And because her father learned to read quietly silently at
Speaker 1: the age of twelve and had to keep it a secret,
Speaker 1: he talked about slavery all the time with her, and
Speaker 1: she talked about it all the time with me, and
Speaker 1: so there was this kind of dull thing, and she
Speaker 1: kept saying, I need you to be smart. If you
Speaker 1: learn things, you can survive in ways that you can
Speaker 1: survive if you don't learn things. And so I became
Speaker 1: somebody interested in the world outside of my world because
Speaker 1: my grandmother the daughter of slaves. Yeah it was a drink, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. That she has had a powerful influence on me.
Speaker 1: But that was my kind of beginnings, and so we
Speaker 1: desperately wanted to go to the public school. In fact,
Speaker 1: my mom was this kind of person who she would
Speaker 1: always answer any question you asked her. And if I said, Mom,
Speaker 1: what's that bright star in the sky tonight, she said, well,
Speaker 1: that's the star that's close to the moon. She wouldn't
Speaker 1: know the name of the planet or anything, but you'd
Speaker 1: always want you to feel like your questions have good answers.
Speaker 1: The one time I remembered her not answering my questions
Speaker 1: when we would drive past the Milton Public School and
Speaker 1: I'd take, what does the word public mean? And she
Speaker 1: bite her lip because you didn't want me to know
Speaker 1: how to be able to go in there, and that
Speaker 1: reality was very hurt. No, she didn't, and when we
Speaker 1: got to the school was all this kind of conflict.
Speaker 1: But eventually things settled down, and I just was so
Speaker 1: struck by the expectations of poor performance that I encountered
Speaker 1: the guidans count said, oh, we're gonna send you to
Speaker 1: votech We're gonna put you in the low section of
Speaker 1: this grade. And I had been doing reading Dr. Seuss
Speaker 1: My mom was one of these people bought books for
Speaker 1: us even though we couldn't afford them. But I felt
Speaker 1: like I was ready and I was provoked by it.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to prove people, no, I can do.
Speaker 1: So what happened, well, I did really well because I
Speaker 1: was when you're in the when you're in the environment
Speaker 1: you're in, when did you realize quote unquote you had it? Well,
Speaker 1: you know eventually because my mom, Yeah, exactly, I got
Speaker 1: put in the kind of the part of third and
Speaker 1: fourth and fifth. Yeah, the advanced track. Was the only
Speaker 1: black kid and then one or two of us that
Speaker 1: it was challenging. Were you learning even then how to
Speaker 1: be that? From that? Absolutely? I was what eight and
Speaker 1: you're the other? But you know, when it was time
Speaker 1: for you to stand up and recite your multiplication tables
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff, I wanted to be strong.
Speaker 1: I wanted to come where you go to high school.
Speaker 1: I went to the same public high school, Cape and
Speaker 1: Lopin high school. In that point you nailed that, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because then you know, I felt like I had been
Speaker 1: on top of it. So I was doing, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: where you go to college. So I went to Eastern College,
Speaker 1: which was a small private school outside of Philadelphia, and
Speaker 1: that was a very different world because it was just beautiful.
Speaker 1: There were lakes and rivers and streams, and I was
Speaker 1: studying philosophy. I'd go sit on these hillsides thinking all
Speaker 1: these deep thoughs, but I was still doing the sports
Speaker 1: and I wasn't drinking. And then that's right, and that's
Speaker 1: how I end up. So then when I'm a senior,
Speaker 1: somebody says, well, what are you going to do after
Speaker 1: you graduate? And that's when I realized, for the first time,
Speaker 1: nobody's going to pay me to philosophize who graduate? And
Speaker 1: I start yes. I started looking, and I realized, you
Speaker 1: can't do graduate work in history of political science unless
Speaker 1: you know something about history. You do I found law
Speaker 1: school because the truth is, I went to Harvard Laws.
Speaker 1: How did that happened? Well, because you didn't have to
Speaker 1: know any thing to go to law school. That was
Speaker 1: really my thinking, and that was the one thing would
Speaker 1: appeal to me exactly, and so I ended up there,
Speaker 1: but I hated it my first year. They were talking
Speaker 1: about torts and contracts, and they weren't talking about race,
Speaker 1: they weren't talking about poverty. They weren't even talking about
Speaker 1: just this race thing. Well, this is a quality thing.
Speaker 1: I felt like, Well, law means we can confront in
Speaker 1: just racism at Harvard. Oh yeah, I mean it was
Speaker 1: ae UM. Well, actually it was actually in Boston. I was,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd never been up there, and I was
Speaker 1: my first weekend there. I was walking in downtown Boston
Speaker 1: and the truck drove by me and said, and the
Speaker 1: guy said, he asked me a question, So, where's Roxbury.
Speaker 1: I didn't understand what he was asking, And he said,
Speaker 1: Where's Rocks? And I kept getting closer to him. When
Speaker 1: I got close to him, he said, go back to Roxbury, nigger.
Speaker 1: That was first weekend I was there. What about on
Speaker 1: the Harvard campus itself or in the classroom? You know,
Speaker 1: I was fairly insulated in the classroom. I was just
Speaker 1: trying to keep up. I didn't experience the kind of
Speaker 1: racial tensions that that I'd seen as a young kid.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that there were no people of color on
Speaker 1: the faculty, had no black law professors, but it was
Speaker 1: and it was difficult to have the conversations that I
Speaker 1: was interested in having. So I left after my first
Speaker 1: year and went to the School of Government, Kennedy School,
Speaker 1: thinking well, this will be a more appropriate forum for
Speaker 1: me to talk about poverty and race and inequality. And
Speaker 1: it was worse. They were teaching us to maximize benefits
Speaker 1: and minimize costs, and it didn't seem to matter whose
Speaker 1: benefits got maximized and whose costs got minimized. And so
Speaker 1: I left there, went back, and that's when I had
Speaker 1: this experience of going to the Deep South and working
Speaker 1: with this human rights organization providing legal services to people
Speaker 1: on death row. Everything changed. Organization it was called went
Speaker 1: right from Harvard to there, Yes, right from Harvard to Alabama.
Speaker 1: And I actually went there as a law student in
Speaker 1: the middle of my law school study to work for
Speaker 1: a month with this organization as a project, an internship
Speaker 1: with a Southern Center for Human Rights, and that's Southern
Speaker 1: Center for you, that in Birmingham in Atlanta, Georgia. And
Speaker 1: that's the first time I met somebody on death row.
Speaker 1: And it's that experien that changed everything. When I met
Speaker 1: this condemned person who was literally dying for legal help,
Speaker 1: was going to be executed because he couldn't find a lawyer.
Speaker 1: And to realize that even in my aignorance, even with
Speaker 1: my limited skills, that I could have an impact on
Speaker 1: the quality of his life and his chance of being
Speaker 1: alive and avoiding wrongful execution. It radicalized everything. Then when
Speaker 1: I got back to Harvard, it all mattered to me.
Speaker 1: I needed to understand civil procedure, in criminal procedure, and
Speaker 1: constitutional law. You couldn't keep me out of the law
Speaker 1: library because I needed to know all the things I needed. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. And then everything changed and I left there,
Speaker 1: and I went to that organization and worked there four
Speaker 1: years before we started this project. Four years. Yeah, why
Speaker 1: didn't you stay there? Because Alabama was really from to
Speaker 1: Atlanta to Alabama. Most people the other well, Alabama was
Speaker 1: in crisis. The people executed in America were executed in Alabama.
Speaker 1: There was no public defender, there were no institutions providing
Speaker 1: legal services. So I went over to start this promotion. Shame,
Speaker 1: no shame at all. Now people were exploiting the absence
Speaker 1: of these resources. And the goal was to start this
Speaker 1: project and then go back to Atlanta. But we couldn't
Speaker 1: find the people we needed to make the project succeed.
Speaker 1: And one year turned into five, five, ten, ten, thirty,
Speaker 1: and here I am. Now you're a grown man. You're
Speaker 1: extremely successful, very admired, smart guy. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: emotion it's a part of this work. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: how do you manage your feelings and how do you
Speaker 1: manage your emotions doing this kind of work? It must
Speaker 1: be tough. It is to what do you do? You know?
Speaker 1: I hateful? It is painful. I think you you just
Speaker 1: demand more, you keep fighting more. Um. You know, you
Speaker 1: have to have different metrics for how you evaluate what
Speaker 1: you're doing. You know. I I tell the story a lot.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's a guy taught me this. I was
Speaker 1: giving a talk in a church. Old guy in a
Speaker 1: wheelchair comes in sitting in the back. He's staring at
Speaker 1: me and older black man and I finished my talk.
Speaker 1: All the kids seem fine, but this older black man
Speaker 1: is just staring at me the whole time I'm talking.
Speaker 1: Hout is very angry look on his face. He's really
Speaker 1: distracting me. When the kids go, this man comes up
Speaker 1: to me and his wheelchair. He has a kid rolled
Speaker 1: him up to me and he gets in my face
Speaker 1: and he says, do you know what you're doing? And
Speaker 1: I look at him. I don't know how to respond,
Speaker 1: and I and he says it again. He says, do
Speaker 1: you know what you're doing? And I stepped back and
Speaker 1: I start mumbling something, and then he says to me,
Speaker 1: he says, you're beating the drum for justice. And then
Speaker 1: he says, you keep beating the drum for justice, and
Speaker 1: it moved me. He grabbed me by my jacket, pulled
Speaker 1: me into his chair, and he turned his head. He says,
Speaker 1: let me show you something, young man, and he says,
Speaker 1: you see this cut I have down here on the
Speaker 1: bottom of my neck because I got that cut in
Speaker 1: Green County, Alabama, nineteen three, trying to register people to vote.
Speaker 1: Then he turned his head and he says, you see
Speaker 1: this scar I got behind my ear. He said, I
Speaker 1: got that scar doing Freedom summer Philadelphia, Mississippi. He turned
Speaker 1: and said he said, you see this dark spot And
Speaker 1: he said I got that bruise during the Children's Crusade
Speaker 1: in Birmingham, Alabama. And then he looked at me. He says,
Speaker 1: people think I'm some old man in a wheelchair covered
Speaker 1: with cuts and bruises and scars. He said, I don't
Speaker 1: tell you something. He said, these aren't my cuts. These
Speaker 1: aren't my bruises, These aren't my scars, he said, these
Speaker 1: are my medals of honor. And that is in some
Speaker 1: ways the way we have to sometimes convert the pain
Speaker 1: into a cause, victory into victory, and you begin to
Speaker 1: realize that if you can beat the drum for justice
Speaker 1: with whatever you have in the face of that, there
Speaker 1: is a strengthening that comes with it, and then you
Speaker 1: feel empowered. You know, ultimately I'm not there yet. I
Speaker 1: want to when I kind of go out say I
Speaker 1: became a freeman because I resisted the things that I
Speaker 1: think bind us and burden us and enslave us and
Speaker 1: confine us and condemn us. And that's kind of a
Speaker 1: kind of a quest that makes you feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: I can keep doing this, and it's energizing in its
Speaker 1: own way. I'm gonna ask you a question, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give you my answer to want you to give
Speaker 1: me yours first, or if you could pick not one
Speaker 1: but among many, what would one be? What do you
Speaker 1: think we need to be doing now in this country
Speaker 1: or even in the state of Alabamas. What thing do
Speaker 1: we need to do? I think we actually really need
Speaker 1: to concertize the mistakes of the past and very visible way.
Speaker 1: I think what's going on in Germany right now is
Speaker 1: really instructive. You go to Germany and you are forced
Speaker 1: to confront the legacy of the Holocaust. You can't spend
Speaker 1: time there without being confronted with that. I'd like that
Speaker 1: to happen in this country. We want to put up
Speaker 1: markers and monuments at every lynching site in America. We
Speaker 1: think the South should be cluttered with reminders of what
Speaker 1: we did through enslavement. I think the civil rights narrative
Speaker 1: needs to change. We need to start talking about all
Speaker 1: the ways in which white people resisted this. What percentage
Speaker 1: of the legislature in Alabama is black? A very small percentage,
Speaker 1: and they have no power a percentage of the population,
Speaker 1: and no person of color can win any statewide office.
Speaker 1: We won't. We know, No, it's so INTI well they do.
Speaker 1: In fact, in fact, we just had one which was
Speaker 1: a ballid initiative to remove the apartheid language that still
Speaker 1: prohibits black and white kids from going to school together
Speaker 1: in Alabama. State Constitution of Alabama still prohibits black and
Speaker 1: white children from going to school together. They tried to
Speaker 1: remove it into thousand and four and the majority people
Speaker 1: said no, let's keep it in. They put it on
Speaker 1: the ballot in and even bigger majority said let's keep
Speaker 1: it in. And it speaks to the lack of shame.
Speaker 1: You think that is because people don't feel in any
Speaker 1: way implicated by that. They don't feel troubled by it,
Speaker 1: they don't feel a shame of they don't feel like
Speaker 1: that it does anything to cast upaul over who they are,
Speaker 1: and that absence of shame condemns they want to maintain
Speaker 1: something as ridiculous as let's leave language in our And
Speaker 1: did anybody who was a leader, political leader, or activists
Speaker 1: there who articulated in any way that defended why they
Speaker 1: needed to have that in there. Yeah, they would say,
Speaker 1: if we take this out, there might be a right
Speaker 1: to equal education. And if there's a right to equal education,
Speaker 1: then our texts might go up. There's always an economic
Speaker 1: rationale to defend oppression, always both or both, you know.
Speaker 1: But we can always come up with something that says,
Speaker 1: if we do this, it's gonna be problematic for us.
Speaker 1: Let me offer you my take, and I mean this
Speaker 1: from the bottom of my heart. The one thing that
Speaker 1: we need in this country right now is we need
Speaker 1: for people like you to run for office, because with
Speaker 1: real political power on the state level on the federal level,
Speaker 1: I don't think it very much done comparatively. But you
Speaker 1: should consider that if you don't mind my saying, no,
Speaker 1: I don't, and I respect that perspective. I do, and
Speaker 1: I do take it to heart because I know that
Speaker 1: it's a product of a lot of careful thinking. And
Speaker 1: I agree with you that the political process has been
Speaker 1: so compromised by people who enter it for all these
Speaker 1: other reasons. My big question is has it been compromised
Speaker 1: in a way that even visionary people can't be vision
Speaker 1: you are? I mean, that's the if I weren't practicing
Speaker 1: an attorney with a forum that I can sometimes manage
Speaker 1: to accomplish real change. I don't think there's any choice
Speaker 1: that I'd have to try to figure out how to
Speaker 1: do that. You don't have to answer this question, but
Speaker 1: I'm assuming it's public record. What's the budget of the
Speaker 1: organization down and now that it's this year is four
Speaker 1: million dollars, So it's four million bucks. And you have
Speaker 1: to run around like a derve or shoal over the
Speaker 1: country giving speeches amazing money yourself. That's right, and it's
Speaker 1: a lot of it's on you. Oh yeah, we don't
Speaker 1: have a development staff or anything like that. No, we
Speaker 1: it's a different model. We've just said, you know, we're
Speaker 1: not going to worry about it. We're gonna hopefully get
Speaker 1: what we need and we're gonna keep doing what we
Speaker 1: want to do. It's not the most uh, you know,
Speaker 1: financially thoughtful way of doing at it, but we've been
Speaker 1: able to do what we want to do. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a challenge. But I look at the work that
Speaker 1: we did on banning life without parole sentences for kids.
Speaker 1: I couldn't have done that as a politician, doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what office I was holding, I could not have done it.
Speaker 1: Touch it couldn't even touch. The death penalty is ultimately
Speaker 1: going to be resolved when we get the courts to
Speaker 1: be so beat down by the inhumanity and the and
Speaker 1: the errors and the cruelty of it that they say
Speaker 1: no more. And so that's a forum that I continued
Speaker 1: to see opportunities for advancing these issues because it's about
Speaker 1: rights and protecting the rights of disfavored people. It is
Speaker 1: no longer something that I'm as optimistic about our political
Speaker 1: process being responsive to my friend who's a politics of that,
Speaker 1: he said that the reality of the politician today, he says, as, yes,
Speaker 1: you have all these powerful tools and nowhere to plug
Speaker 1: them in exactly. Yeah, I don't want to kind of
Speaker 1: give up on it because I think we still need
Speaker 1: good people to do it. But I definitely want to
Speaker 1: find ways. Yeah, I am torn, but I definitely want
Speaker 1: to find ways to get out there. And We're going
Speaker 1: to keep doing that, you know, And I'm excited about
Speaker 1: these projects. I think that we are going to push.
Speaker 1: I think we can reduce the prison population by half
Speaker 1: in the next ten years if we push in the
Speaker 1: right way. You know, they are narratives we have to
Speaker 1: control both state and federal nationwide. I think we can
Speaker 1: get well. I think it's the kind of declaring that
Speaker 1: the war on drugs was wrong, which now people on
Speaker 1: the right and left are comfortable with drug policy. Well,
Speaker 1: we think that we should just decriminalize these sentences that
Speaker 1: have put people no, because I think that's a harder
Speaker 1: sell in too many places, and we don't need to
Speaker 1: legalize to get people out of jails in prisons. Personally
Speaker 1: think that certain drugs should be legal. I don't really
Speaker 1: feel I don't. Actually, I'm I'm I'm. I see the
Speaker 1: content intos of drug addiction and drug dependency, and poor
Speaker 1: and minority communities don't want that. Yeah, No, I don't. Really.
Speaker 1: I want people to not be drug dependent, because your
Speaker 1: life is compromised through that stuff. But more than that,
Speaker 1: I just want to get these people out of prison
Speaker 1: and not drug dependent, because then they can be good
Speaker 1: workers and they can take advantage of whatever job programs
Speaker 1: we create, which you can't take advantage of if you're
Speaker 1: drug dependent, truthfully, and then you can become a good father,
Speaker 1: and you can become a good husband or a good daughter,
Speaker 1: and a good wife, and a good child and a
Speaker 1: good parent, all these things that people can't be when
Speaker 1: their lives have been so destroyed by the distractions that
Speaker 1: you have to have to cope with the ugliness of life.
Speaker 1: And for me, that becomes both a moral imperative but
Speaker 1: also a strategy for improving public safety and recovery for
Speaker 1: communities that have been ravaged by so much threat and menace.
Speaker 1: But I think we can do it that way of
Speaker 1: reducing eliminating people being under jails in prison, and then
Speaker 1: just having some proportionate rational sentencing. It's crazy. We we
Speaker 1: have to. We have to have a complete We do
Speaker 1: reconstruc we didn't we do. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 1: You're very welcome. Brian Stevenson recently published Just Mercy, a
Speaker 1: memoir about his experiences fighting injustices in the American legal system.
Speaker 1: The work is stressful. Rosa Parks once personally warned Brian
Speaker 1: about exhaustion. To relax, he turns to his baby grand
Speaker 1: piano at home. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing.