As District Attorney, I have a fair amount of influence. Sometimes people are influenced by my words, sometimes by my title, and sometimes by a combination of both. Of course, being an “influencer” does not mean that I can’t be influenced. Many people have influenced me to change my mind, my course, my direction: Harry Truman, my friends, my mother and father, Justice Louis Brandeis, and many people in this room, including my wife Amber.

Our honored guest today, Bryan Stevenson, has affected the way I look at race and justice. In fact, he helped changed my mind at an age and time that I didn’t expect it to be changed. It was an unexpected, uncomfortable and difficult shift. It began standing among the powerful sculptures of the lynching memorial that Mr. Stevenson created in Alabama, reading the statistics, listening to the stories in the Legacy Museum he founded, and re-learning the bloody history of the civil rights struggle.

Mr. Stevenson’s powerful influence on our society has been documented in his book, “Just Mercy,” and the movie made of it, which we screened for a prior Lincoln’s Birthday training in 2019. If only Michael B. Jordan would play me someday. He’s a little too tall, I think. However, Mr. Stevenson’s reputation in the legal world and in our country stands very tall.

Mr. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.

Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases before the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 decision that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his team have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.

Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. All of which I visited and recommend that you visit.

Mr. Stevenson’s work has won him numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant; the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association’s highest honor; the Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union after he was nominated by United States Supreme Court Justice John Stevens; the Public Lawyer of the Year Award by the National Association of Public Interest Lawyers; and the Olof Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden for international human rights.

A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, Mr. Stevenson has received over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, including degrees from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Oxford University. I am giving you a Challenge Coin for making our criminal justice system more compassionate and more fair.

Please welcome Bryan Stevenson.