Brian Stevenson, the prominent lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative,

has blazed a trail representing the poor, wrongly convicted, and those on death row.

He recently sat down with Jeff Bennett to discuss his career and the re-release of his best-selling book, Just Mercy,

a story of justice and redemption.

Brian Stevenson, thanks for being with us.

My pleasure.

Just Mercy was first published in October of 2014.

It became a New York Times bestseller.

It was adapted into a film starring Michael B. Jordan.

Lots of acclaim and attention.

How has it significantly changed

the criminal justice system or the public's understanding of the system in the decade since its

release? I've been really encouraged by what's happened over the last 10 years. When I started

doing this work 40 years ago, there were very few organizations, there

were very few resources available to people who were in jails and prisons, people wrongly

convicted, people condemned to die. And that seemed to be not changing, but in the last 20 years,

I'll say, but certainly in the last 10 years, that has shifted enormously. We've had eight states abolish the death penalty.

The rates of incarceration have dropped.

We're no longer seeing that steady increase that we saw during the last decades of the 20th century.

We've seen some real significant reforms.

Most of the young people that I wrote about in Just Mercy who were condemned to die in prison

when they were 13 and 14 have been released and they're now out.

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