Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
'Hopelessness is the Enemy of Justice' An Interview with Bryan
Stevenson
Dean A. Strang
Monday, December 28, 2015
The Progressive
Most trial lawyers engage, daily, with the emotions and vices that
underlie human conflict—anger, jealousy, greed, spite. Some do more than
engage: They adopt these vices. Bryan Stevenson is the rare exception. He has
dedicated his life to healing anger and fear, and bringing light to the darkest
corners of our criminal justice system.
Harvard graduate, MacArthur fellow, and founder of the Equal Justice
Initiative, Stevenson is vibrantly bright and thoughtful. He exudes hope. He
lives much of his life among the dispossessed and hopeless.
I first met Bryan Stevenson more than twenty-five years ago in
Montgomery, Alabama. He was shepherding a small group of smart young lawyers
through the grim reality of post-conviction work in death penalty cases in
Alabama’s courts.
Today, he speaks to large groups and travels the country.
Stevenson calls on us to hurry after him through the death rows, prisons, impoverished
communities, and despairing neighborhoods he serves, and to nurture, within
ourselves and without, the emotions and virtues that heal.
His new book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, is a
bestseller. I visited with him when he came to Madison, Wisconsin, where he had
been chosen as the University of Wisconsin’s “Go Big Read” author. Hundreds of
people turned out to pack a giant lecture hall and several adjoining spaces to
hear Stevenson speak.
Q:The message of hope in your book is unmistakable, but I suspect
that the origin of the book lies in part with anger. I’m wondering if that’s
right.
Bryan Stevenson: I think of it as a burden rather than anger. I
didn’t have to represent people on death row, I didn’t have to do the kind of
work that I do, and I never wanted my choice to become something that made me
angry. When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a
certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by
an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and
unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me. The book is an effort
to confront this burden.
I’m persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular
basis, they would want change.
I don’t think anybody who had been with me when I was holding a
fourteen-year-old boy who was crying hysterically because he had been raped and
abused in a jail cell would want him to stay in that cell. But our system of
justice is so isolated. We’ve created these walls and barriers that shield what
happens in our courtrooms and in our jails and prisons and in the margins of
society with such effectiveness that most of us go through our lives with no
consciousness about what these things really represent.
Q: Working in the justice system, what caught you off guard about
these burdens?
Stevenson: It was the sense that people could actually know what
the right thing is and still feel obligated to do the wrong thing because of
politics or some other collateral concern. That was something I didn’t really
anticipate. But it is structural and systemic.
Q: You say outsiders would be appalled by the unfairness that you
encounter within the justice system. But there are hundreds of thousands of
people who are insiders in the justice system who don’t appreciate that they,
or we, have to take responsibility for change. Why?
Stevenson: We’ve all been acculturated into accepting the
inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and
racial disparities and discrimination against the poor. I think hopelessness is
the enemy of justice. We have too many insiders who become hopeless about what
they can do. The defense attorney who has given up on talking about the
presumption of guilt that gets assigned to people of color. The judge who has
given up on trying to insist on the rule of law even when it’s inconvenient and
unpopular. The prosecutor who has been corrupted by the power that he or she
has accumulated through mandatory sentencing schemes. You can be a career
professional as a judge, a prosecutor, sometimes as a defense attorney, and
never insist on fairness and justice. That’s tragic and that’s what we have to
change.
We’ve made finality more important than fairness. We shield even
clear violations of people’s rights if [objections] aren’t raised at the right
time in the right way.
Q: After wrongful convictions are overturned, apologists often
say, “Look, that proves the system works.” That’s an infuriating claim for many
of us who work in criminal justice. In your book you’ve assigned instead the
term “provocative” to that claim. What do you mean by that?
Stevenson: In April, I walked out of a Birmingham city jail with a
man named Anthony Ray Hinton who had spent thirty years behind bars for a crime
he did not commit. He was locked down in a five-by-seven cell twenty-four hours
a day for thirty years. The evidence of his innocence was presented to the
state in 1999. The prosecution had said a gun they found in his mom’s home
matched bullets found at the murder scene, and based on that evidence and that
evidence alone, they convicted him. We got the best gun experts in the country
to look at that gun and those bullets and say, “These do not match, that man is
not guilty.”
The state fought us even after that evidence was presented because
the prosecutors were more comfortable with the prospect of executing an
innocent person than with acknowledging that they had put an innocent man on
death row.
Eventually we got the U.S. Supreme Court involved, we got the case
overturned, and he walked out of jail. It was a really glorious, wonderful
moment. But I’ve spent a lot of time with Mr. Hinton over the last six months,
and what we have done to him is nothing short of criminal.
That’s what’s provocative to me—that we can victimize people, we
can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful
thing to do. And it’s not the first time we’ve done it. The greatest evil of
American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of
racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with
that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.
Q: If we were to replace a culture of assigning blame in the
criminal system with a culture of humility, a recognition that mistakes are
bound to happen, would that get us anywhere?
Stevenson: I absolutely think we need a paradigm shift where we’re
not motivated by fear and anger. We’ve got politicians competing with each
other over who can be the toughest on crime. Whenever society begins to create
policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.
We have to step away from the politics of fear and anger and start
asking ourselves the more basic question: What are we trying to achieve? If we
did that, then we’re not going to put people in jails and prisons who aren’t a
threat to public safety and spend billions of dollars warehousing them when it
doesn’t accomplish anything. We’re going to use those dollars to actually
promote care and treatment.
That paradigm shift is something that we have to have all the way
through the system. Our police officers become warriors who are using the fear
and anger paradigm to battle against whole communities. We don’t need police
officers who see themselves as warriors. We need police officers who see
themselves as guardians and parts of the community. You can’t police a
community that you’re not a part of. That paradigm shift is part of how we
create true custodians of justice. If you’re just the person with power,
exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you’re going to be an operative of
injustice and inequality.
Q: You’ve spoken powerfully about the persistence of racism and
fear in the criminal justice system. Expand on that.
Stevenson: I don’t think there’s any question that our system
treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.
The presumption of guilt and dangerousness that gets assigned to some people is
going to compromise their ability to get to a fair outcome. I also think our
comfort level with tolerating disparities based on race has made us comfortable
with all kinds of other disparities and all kinds of unfairness.
The Bureau of Justice is now projecting that one in three black
male babies in this country will go to prison.
That is unbelievable. It wasn’t true in the twentieth century, it
wasn’t true in the nineteenth century, it became true in the twenty-first
century. And we’re not talking about it. For Latino boys, it’s one in six.
We need to start talking about the forces that are creating this
kind of reality. I’m still shocked that we have these data that are so
disturbing—a 640 percent increase in the number of women being sent to prison
[from 1980 to 2010], almost 70 percent of whom are single parents with minor
children and most are not going for violent crimes.
Q: Would you talk about how this relates to the legacy of slavery?
Stevenson: I think there is a contempt for the human dignity of
people who were enslaved. You couldn’t see them as fully human and so you
didn’t respect their desire to be connected to a family and a place. That was
the only way you could tolerate and make sense of lynching and the terror that
lynching represented.
We did horrific, brutal, barbaric things to people during these
lynchings, mutilating bodies and cutting off extremities and taking parts of
the body as a souvenir. What kind of a society does that? Only a society that
doesn’t think of that person as fully human. That disconnect means you’re
necessarily not going to respect their aspirations of identity, family, and
connectedness.
And that’s true today. We haven’t dealt with that fundamental
disconnect, that fundamental contempt for these people because of their race or
their ethnicity. That, to me, is the essential problem.
Can we get our society to begin to acknowledge the cruelty, the
barbarism of these institutions and what that means and what that says about
us?
Q: Your grandfather was murdered by teenagers when you were a
teenager yourself. Did that draw you to, or initially repel you from, the work
that you’re now doing with juveniles in prison?
Stevenson: When my grandfather was murdered, the question my
grandmother and family members were asking was: Why would someone do that? We
were more preoccupied with the circumstances that would create children acting
in this way.
There are many places in this country where the majority of
children are traumatized by the time they’re four and five. They’re in
households where they see violence and where people are always shouting. They
need the same kinds of interventions that our combat veterans need when they
come back from war. Unfortunately, our current system only thinks in one
language, which is punishment.
Q: How do we make it more acceptable to speak of love, compassion,
mercy, or redemption in our system of justice?
Stevenson: I think we have to affirm the things that matter to us.
We have a relationship to one another. We can’t have a healthy, strong
relationship until we learn to say, “I’m sorry.” I don’t know any two people
who’ve been married or in a strong relationship for a long time who haven’t
learned to say, “I’m sorry.” We haven’t learned how to do that when it comes to
dealing with the shameful parts of our history.
The other thing is we have to believe in things we haven’t seen.
Part of what constrains us is that we haven’t actually seen what a loving
system of justice looks like because we’ve been so fearful that that’s not
going to be as harsh and punitive as we think it should be.
Ultimately, I think we have to want more. We have to aspire to
something that feels more like freedom than what we have in this country. We’re
not free, we can’t relate to one another who are different without bumping into
each other and creating these tensions and fears.
There is a better, freer place that we can achieve in this nation,
but we’d have to want it.
I use this Reinhold Niebuhr quote in my book: “Love is the motive,
but justice is the instrument.” If you love your country, then you need to be
thinking a lot more critically about what justice requires. If you love your
community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances, and
that’s not something we’ve done.
This interview originally appeared in the December 2015/January
2016 issue of The Progressive magazine. Dean A. Strang is a criminal defense lawyer
in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of Worse Than the Devil: Anarchists,
Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror (University of Wisconsin
Press, 2013).
- See more at: https://portside.org/print/node/10508#sthash.PIsuUOvW.dpuf
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment