By Robert Salonga | rsalonga@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: February 17, 2025 at 6:05 AM PST

SAN JOSE – Bryan Stevenson, the decorated civil-rights attorney who famously helped overturn the wrongful death sentences of more than 100 condemned people over the past four decades, looks at the current criminal justice and political landscape and insists, with resolute belief, that there is reason for optimism.

He explains himself by drawing on the memory of his enslaved great-grandparents who inspired his outlook.

 “They had a hope for freedom when freedom was irrational,” Stevenson told a rapt audience at the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors chambers last Wednesday. “I knew I was standing on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less. And when you understand that legacy that we all have, you understand that this is not a time to become hopeless about what we can do. This is not a time to think that we can’t do this.”

 Stevenson appeared at the invitation of District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who credits Stevenson’s work with helping him decide five years ago to stop pursuing the death penalty. In attendance were dozens of county prosecutors, public defenders, law enforcement leaders and the district attorneys from San Francisco and Contra Costa counties. 

 Stevenson’s oratory magnetism was powerful enough to unite, at least for a couple of hours, these disparate and sometimes adversarial forces. He urged his audience to explore restorative solutions rather than only punishment to decrease crime, to address drug addiction as a health matter more than a criminal one, and to move away from treating minors who commit crimes as if they are fully formed adults.

 “We had a whole four decades where legislators, and it’s starting to happen again, talk as if they could put crimes in jail,” he said. “They’re talking as if they can put these crimes in prison. And we can’t put a crime in prison. We can only put a person in prison. And people are not crimes. People can commit crimes. We can hold them accountable for the crimes they committed, but they’re not crimes. People are more than crimes, and if we remember that, it will, I think, cause us to think differently about what justice requires.”

 Stevenson’s life story has become well known over the years, as the founder of the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice – also known as the National Lynching Memorial. His stature in popular culture was bolstered by a memoir that inspired the 2019 film “Just Mercy,” in which he was portrayed by actor Michael B. Jordan.

It was a visit to the memorial by Rosen and his staff that helped fuel his eventual decision to declare that the office under his leadership would cease to seek the death penalty. When Rosen announced the policy change in 2020, he cited how capital punishment is inexorably affected by racial inequity and a higher-than-usual rate of prosecutorial overreach and error.

“He helped change my mind at an age and time that I didn’t expect it to be changed. It was an unexpected, uncomfortable and difficult shift,” Rosen said while introducing Stevenson. “It began standing among the powerful sculptures of the lynching memorial that Mr. Stevenson created in Alabama, reading the statistics and the scenes of the stories in the legacy museum that he founded and re-learning the bloody history of the civil rights struggle.”

By his organization’s estimate, there has been one wrongful conviction proven for every eight executions in the United States, Stevenson says. He bristles at the idea that at least 12% of condemned prisoners risk being executed on errant grounds.

“I’m really worried about the moment that we are in, and I believe that our obligation to do justice is going to require us to have identities rooted in compassion and conviction … but also to change narratives that are undermining the rule of law, to change narratives that are feeding bigotry and violence and discrimination,” he said. “I don’t like the politics of fear. I don’t like it when leaders anywhere in the world, and we’ve seen this throughout history, try to govern through fear and anger, because fear and anger will cause you to tolerate things you shouldn’t tolerate.”

Stevenson made several references to ongoing clashes between the Trump Administration and judges either pausing or signaling their opposition to executive orders aimed at aggressively slashing government staffing and spending, and undoing longstanding constitutional bedrocks like birthright citizenship.

“New questions are emerging about whether we are actually committed to the rule of law, and I think the historic protectors of the rule of law, and I think specifically about prosecutors and law enforcement officers and people in the administration of justice, have to be vocal, and they have to be visual,” he said. “If elected officials are not going to comply with court rulings and are not going to follow the law, why should anybody?”