American public-interest lawyer, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and the most consequential American advocate of his generation against capital punishment, excessive sentencing, and the racialized machinery of the criminal legal system. Stevenson and EJI have won major victories in the U.S. Supreme Court, including Miller v. Alabama (2012), which held mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles unconstitutional; EJI has overturned death sentences and wrongful convictions for more than 140 condemned people.
Just Mercy (2014) — his memoir built around the case of Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongfully sent to Alabama's death row for a murder he did not commit — made his work widely known and has become one of the most assigned books on law, race, and American justice. The book's central line — "the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice" — and its argument that each of us is "more than the worst thing we have ever done" are explicitly Christian in provenance, drawing from a Sermon-on-the-Mount lineage of mercy, proximity to the suffering, and the refusal to write off the condemned.
In 2018 EJI opened two Montgomery institutions that have reshaped American public memory: the Legacy Museum, tracing the line from slavery through lynching and convict leasing to mass incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first national monument to the more than 4,400 African Americans lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Stevenson's working principles — get proximate, change the narratives that sustain inequality, stay hopeful, do uncomfortable things — form a coherent practical ethics of justice work rooted in faith, craft, and patience.