The publication is reproduced in full below:
HONORING BRYAN STEVENSON--BEST-SELLING AUTHOR AND TRAILBLAZING CIVIL
RIGHTS ATTORNEY
______
HON. LISA BLUNT ROCHESTER
of delaware
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Ms. BLUNT ROCHESTER. Madam Speaker, today I rise to welcome home the distinguished Delawarean Bryan Stevenson and to celebrate his impressive career fighting for fairness and equity in the criminal justice system.
Mr. Stevenson was born in the town of Milton, a rural community in southern Delaware. It was in the First State and at the Prospect African Methodist Episcopal Church where Mr. Stevenson started to nurture his belief in redemption that ``each person in our society is more than the worst thing they've ever done.'' Raised by a strong Sussex County family, Mr. Stevenson began to show the leadership and passion for public service that would propel him in life. At Cape Henlopen High School, he excelled academically and served as the student body president. He won several public speaking contests, demonstrating rhetorical prowess that would soon lead him to argue landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Stevenson would go on to earn a J.D. and M.P.P. from Harvard University and the position of Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
In 1989, Mr. Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to wrongly convicted prisoners, especially Alabama prisoners on death row. One of EJI's first clients was Walter McMillian, a Black man convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a young white woman. Due to Mr. Stevenson's systematic dismantling of the prosecution's case, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Mr. McMillian's conviction was unconstitutional. The State of Alabama finally dropped charges after mounting evidence proved Mr. McMillian's innocence. On March 3, 1993, Mr. McMillian was released from death row and walked out of a courtroom a free man. At the time, Mr. McMillian was one of the first to be exonerated from death row since the end of the civil rights movement. Since Mr. McMillian was exonerated, Mr. Stevenson and EJI prevented more than 130 people from receiving the death penalty.
Mr. Stevenson personally argued several cases before the Supreme Court and won major landmark decisions reshaping American jurisprudence. In the 2012 case, Miller v Alabama, Mr. Stevenson successfully argued that the imposition of a mandatory life-sentence-
without-parole for a juvenile violates the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In the 2019 case, Madison v. Alabama, Mr. Stevenson successfully secured a ruling that would protect prisoners who suffer from dementia from execution. These cases before the Supreme Court demonstrate Mr. Stevenson's commitment to equity in the criminal justice system and prove that Mr. Stevenson is one of America's best public interest attorneys.
Yet the good works of Mr. Stevenson were not confined to his successes in the courtroom. In 2018, Mr. Stevenson and EJI opened two new museums in Montgomery to chronicle the legacy of slavery and racial segregation. The Legacy Museum chronicled the post-slavery evolution of racial violence in sharecropping, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice records the names of 4,400 victims of lynchings from 1877 through 1950. Through EJI, he launched major efforts to address the legacy of slavery in America. EJI has published several studies on racial violence and inequities in the law and state constitutions, including the highly influential Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. He also brought public attention to the racial injustices of the U.S. legal system as the author of the bestselling 2015 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and adapted into the 2019 film, Just Mercy. Both the memoir and film received significant awards and nominations, including NAACP Image Awards, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards.
On October 8, 2022, I will have the privilege to join the Town of Milton and the Milton Community Foundation to honor the selfless dedication of Mr. Stevenson. Our country is so blessed to have him as a steward of justice. As he has so eloquently said--we all have a responsibility to create a just society. How fortunate we are to have Bryan Stevenson as our leader of that movement.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 160(1), Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 160(2)
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