The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) will present an author talk and book signing with noted civil rights attorney and Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Founder Bryan Stevenson on Saturday, February 28, at 10 a.m. in BCRI’s Odessa Woolfolk Gallery. Stevenson will sign copies of his critically acclaimed book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required at www.bcri.org and seating is limited.
According to publishers Spiegel and Grau, Just Mercy follows one of Stevenson’s first cases after he founded EJI, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need. The case was of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he did not commit. Just Mercy follows the suspenseful battle to free Walter before the state executes him, while also stepping back to tell the profoundly moving stories of men, women, and even children, who found themselves at the mercy of a system often incapable of showing it. Just Mercy was named as one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by Time and one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Review.
Bryan Stevenson is a public-interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. He is a professor of law at New York University Law School and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based group that 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.
EJI won an historic ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. Stevenson has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued six times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant and is the 2013 recipient of BCRI’s highest honor, the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government and has been awarded 14 honorary doctorate degrees.
