Rare Breed - profiles of three defense lawyers who work death penalty cases, Stephen Bright, Bryan Stevenson, and John Holderidge

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 5, 2001 by Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

Statistics from the Equal Justice Initiative, a death penalty resource center in Alabama, confirm Bright's description of all-white courtrooms trying black defendants. In Alabama, African-Americans constitute 2 percent of the state's prosecutors, 4 percent of its criminal court judges and 66 percent of its prison population.

"Executions colored by race and poverty necessarily become a civil rights issue," said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of The Equal Justice Initiative. "More important, they become a human rights issue."

Stevenson interned at the Southern Center for Human Rights while still a law student at Harvard. Issues of race and poverty had always interested him, but he had "no clear expectations" for himself and he admits that he "went to law school by default." But his months in Atlanta gave him a vocation that still rings true. "I saw people literally dying from lack of representation. Once I was exposed to the insidious racial bias, it became difficult to imagine doing anything else."

A native of Delaware, Stevenson wages his fight for the civil rights of the condemned in Alabama, one of the poorest and most conviction-prone states in the country. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Alabama, which currently has 187 people on death row and 300 facing capital trials, has issued more death sentences than any other state in the country. Its death row population has doubled in the past 10 years. The elevated numbers are due in part to a quirky Alabama law that allows a judge to reject a jury's verdict of life imprisonment, replacing it with death.

Twenty-five percent of the state's death row population received a life sentence that was overridden by a judge, the initiative reports.

Moreover, Alabama and Georgia are the only two states in the country that do not guarantee counsel to death row inmates after a direct appeal to the highest state court. In Alabama, lawyers representing inmates who wish to raise additional claims at the state or federal level cannot be paid more than $1,000 per post-conviction proceeding. It's an absurdly low fee for the legal world, where "attorneys can charge $25,000 to $50,000" just to keep out of prison a client accused of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, said Stevenson.

The state cap has meant that death row inmates, desperate to have their cases reviewed, are dependent on the good will of volunteer lawyers.

"If you don't find the attorney, you don't get the review, and for death penalty clients, these are the most important," he said. Post-conviction reviews provide the defendant with a last opportunity to point out errors made at the trial level, errors that can be as egregious as having a defense attorney who falls asleep in court.

Stevenson estimates that 40 prisoners on Alabama's death row are currently without counsel.

In 1989, the state of Alabama was paying only $600 to any attorney willing to take on a post-conviction review. That was the year Stevenson met Walter "Johnny D" McMillian, accused of killing young Ronda Morrison. McMillian's story is the subject of Pete Earley's book Circumstantial Evidence (Bantam, 1996).