Stevenson, a dynamic speaker and a renowned lawyer who has represented capital defendants and prisoners for more than 30 years, spoke at the LBJ School Auditorium on Sep 27. Stevenson is a clinical faculty member at NYU School of Law, and since 1989 he has been executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Alabama. EJI is a nonprofit organization founded by Stevenson that focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the U.S. EJI litigates on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged, and others whose trials are marked by racial bias, ineffective representation or prosecutorial misconduct.
Stevenson’s work has won him national acclaim. He received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award Prize in 1995, the Olaf Palme Prize in Sweden for international human rights in 2000, and he has also been recognized in other major awards from the ACLU, the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers, and the American College of Trial Lawyers. He has also written extensively on criminal justice, capital punishment and civil rights issues, and is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Just Mercy, which won the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Best Non-Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the NAACP Image Award for Best Non-Fiction. In 2015, he was named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, and has been awarded 16 honorary doctorate degrees.