The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina is very proud to announce that Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system, will be the keynote speaker at the 45th Annual Frank Porter Graham Awards Ceremony in Chapel Hill on February 15, 2014.
“We have a system of justice in [the U.S.] that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” Bryan Stevenson explains in his online TED Talk that has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. “Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.”
Stevenson has been representing capital defendants and death row prisoners in the Deep South since 1985 when he was a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and has since won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system.
Since graduating from Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, Stevenson has assisted in securing relief for condemned prisoners, advocated for low-income people and developed community-based reform litigation aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice. He is also on the faculty at New York University School of Law. He is the 1991 recipient of the ACLU’s National Medal of Liberty and a 1995 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship Award Prize, commonly known as a “genius grant.”
Under Stevenson’s leadership, the Equal Justice Initiative has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent prisoners on death row, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. In 2012, Stevenson successfully persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that sentences of life imprisonment without parole imposed on children convicted of most crimes in the U.S. are unconstitutional.
You can read about our 2014 Frank Porter Graham Award recipients here. More details about the upcoming awards ceremony will be announced soon.