Bryan Stevenson was born in Milton, Delaware, in 1959. He attended segregated schools as a young child, before local integration. In a later interview, he recalled the impression made by lawyers who helped enforce that change even where it lacked majority support.
He studied at Eastern University and completed degrees in law and public policy at Harvard in 1985. During law school, work with a Southern human-rights organization brought him into contact with people on death row. He subsequently practiced with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, representing prisoners who lacked the resources to obtain adequate assistance.
In 1989, Stevenson established the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center in Montgomery, the organization later known as the Equal Justice Initiative. Its work developed beyond individual capital cases to include challenges involving wrongful convictions, excessive punishment and children prosecuted as adults. Stevenson and his colleagues pursued these cases as an organization.
One widely documented case involved Walter McMillian, whose release from death row Stevenson won in 1993. Stevenson later wrote *Just Mercy*, published in 2014, recounting legal advocacy and the people affected by the criminal justice system. The book subsequently became a feature film, bringing this work to another audience.
In 2012, he argued the juvenile-sentencing cases decided together in *Miller v. Alabama* and *Jackson v. Hobbs*. The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling prohibited mandatory life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder, requiring consideration of youth as a circumstance before imposing such a sentence.
EJI's public-history work includes the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in Montgomery in 2018. These sites examine slavery, racial terror, segregation and their aftermath. Explaining this expansion in a 2024 interview, Stevenson said he wanted to engage people beyond courtrooms in understanding the history surrounding present legal disputes. He remains EJI's founder and executive director.
