A chance for redemption

One of my personal heroes, Bryan Stevenson, won a huge victory this week, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a historic ruling holding that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children are unconstitutional. The decision was based on two cases his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, pushed to the fore.

Stevenson is the director of EJI, which is based in Montgomery, Ala. It’s a nonprofit that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners caught up in the criminal-justice system. The recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, Stevenson has dedicated his life to helping poor people, and especially poor people of color and juveniles, be treated fairly under the law.

I learned of him from reading journalist Pete Earley’s excellent 1996 book, Circumstantial Evidence, about the first big case Stevenson won. Ironically, it involved a black man in Monroeville, Ala., the birthplace of Harper Lee and the setting of her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That man was Walter McMillian, who had been wrongly convicted of killing a young white woman in 1986 and sentenced to death.

Stevenson, fresh out of Harvard Law, turned down numerous offers from prestigious law firms, choosing instead to move to the Deep South to do public-interest legal work. Stevenson never doubted McMillian’s innocence. When the young woman was killed, McMillian was at a backyard fish-fry with some two dozen people. His alibi was ironclad, except that his witnesses were all black. The all-white jury ignored their statements.

The local sheriff and others in Monroe County’s white power structure fought Stevenson all the way. They weren’t about to let some uppity Harvard nigra show them up. But Stevenson outsmarted them at every turn, showing that the state’s witnesses had lied on the stand and the prosecution had suppressed exculpatory evidence. McMillian’s conviction was overturned, and he was released after spending six years on death row.

One of EJI’s focuses in recent years has been on children sentenced to death in prison. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision confirmed what the group has long argued: that children are biologically different from adults and less responsible for their wrongdoing, and that they have the capacity to rehabilitate themselves and lead good lives.

California is not one of the 29 states that impose mandatory death in prison, so the court’s decision will have no impact here, said Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey. The only local juvenile tried as an adult and sentenced to death in prison is Freddie Siordia, a Chico youth who was 16 when, during a gang fight, he stabbed two men, one fatally, shouting gang slogans as he did so.

The judge in the case had the option of reducing Siordia’s jury sentence to 25-to-life but chose not to do so, Ramsey said, citing Siordia’s membership in a gang as the clincher. But family members said he was a kid trying to impress his older brothers, also members of the gang. Either way, Bryan Stevenson would argue, he was only 16. He should have been given a chance to redeem himself.

Robert Speer is editor of the CN&R.