Who is Bryan Stevenson?

Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer. He primarily deals with death-penalty defense.
Learning about Stevenson's background, we can see how influential it was to his deciding to become a lawyer at all, and particularly one dealing with such delicate matters of the law. Stevenson grew up in South Delaware during the sixties and therefore was around to experience racism and segregation (both while segregation was legalized and the informal segregation that continued long after it had been abolished). The injustice that he witnessed growing up in such an environment troubled him deeply. He wanted to find a way to challenge the bias attitudes held against a seeming minority; he found this during law school, where he worked for a Human Rights Center that represented those on death-row.
One major influence from his early life was attending and becoming involved in a Methodist Church; it helped to shape his moral values and to ingrain in him the belief that redemption was possible. To this day, Stevenson seeks to provide justice by protecting minorities who may not overwise have the chance for such redemption; one example of this is his work in prohibiting the sentencing of children under 18 either to a death sentence or to life imprisonment without parole.
Because of his dedicated work in this difficult field, Stevenson has won many awards and has gained the respect and admiration of many. He is still continuing in his efforts to educate more people about his stand against injustice, and he does this effectively through various means including public speaking and recently a book entitled Just Mercy.

Bryan Stevenson is an attorney and activist whose work focuses on systemic discrepancies within the judicial system. As an African American man raised in a rural area, his primary focus is to highlight and fix issues of inherent bias through sentencing reform and social consciousness around the issue of racism in America.
Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 1994 and has since served as the executive director for the organization. The EJI describes itself as an organization that is:

"committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society." (eji.org)

As a lawyer, Stevenson has worked with the Equal Justice Initiative to argue cases all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, such as Roper v. Simmons and Montgomery v. Louisiana. In almost all of their cases, Stevenson and the EJI provide legal representation for individuals whose cases exhibit the elements of a wrongful conviction, such as poor legal representation or inherent bias within the judicial system.
Stevenson currently lives and works in Montgomery, Alabama. in 2014, he published Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a memoir reflecting on his career and struggle for reform within the justice system.
https://eji.org/