Bryan Stevenson

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2015

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's guest this week is Bryan Stevenson.

An American lawyer, he is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a private, not-for-profit organisation working on death penalty cases, cases of children sentenced as adults, prison and sentencing reform, and issues of race and poverty.

His great grandparents were slaves and he himself went to a segregated school in southern Delaware. Although from a poor African American background he made it to Harvard Law School. Since then he has secured relief for over a hundred prisoners sentenced to death. He has argued in front of the Supreme Court six times and won landmark rulings about the sentencing of children for both homicide and non-homicide offences. His TED talk from March 2012 has been viewed over two million times.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the lawyer Brian Stevenson, his life's work is caring about
0:40.5	difficult things. Founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative
0:44.8	based in Alabama, he specializes in appealing death penalty cases, the rights of
0:49.2	children in the penal system, and all the complex issues surrounding race, poverty and the law.
0:55.3	He's pretty busy.
0:56.7	Growing up in a happy close-knit home, money was tight and his first few years of education
1:01.3	were at a segregated school. Later he went on to
1:04.6	Harvard and recently Barack Obama appointed him to a task force on 21st century
1:10.0	policing. America's racial history runs right through his life and work.
1:14.8	His great grandparents were slaves.
1:17.1	He was very close to his grandmother, a tough, strong woman, who'd been through a lot,
1:21.4	his grandfather's violent murder left the family heartbroken.
1:25.3	His work in prisons and on death row has he says, taught me some basic and humbling truths,
1:31.0	including this vital lesson. Each of us is more than the worst
1:35.7	thing that we have ever done. So welcome Brian Stevenson. Firstly, how challenging is
1:41.4	it for you, I wonder, to apply yourself to these cases that are
1:45.4	very distressing and to work on behalf of people who have done terrible things?
1:50.5	Well, it's difficult work, there's no question about it, but it's also deeply engaging.
1:56.7	These are people who are condemned, these are people who have been judged to have no moral redeeming features beyond hope and I've never met anybody about
	...

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