[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 160 (Tuesday, October 4, 2022)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1019-E1020]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 HONORING BRYAN STEVENSON--BEST-SELLING AUTHOR AND TRAILBLAZING CIVIL 
                            RIGHTS ATTORNEY

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. LISA BLUNT ROCHESTER

                              of delaware

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, October 4, 2022

  Ms. BLUNT ROCHESTER. Madam Speaker, today I rise to welcome home the 
distinguished Delawarean Bryan Stevenson and to

[[Page E1020]]

celebrate his impressive career fighting for fairness and equity in the 
criminal justice system.
  Mr. Stevenson was born in the town of Milton, a rural community in 
southern Delaware. It was in the First State and at the Prospect 
African Methodist Episcopal Church where Mr. Stevenson started to 
nurture his belief in redemption that ``each person in our society is 
more than the worst thing they've ever done.'' Raised by a strong 
Sussex County family, Mr. Stevenson began to show the leadership and 
passion for public service that would propel him in life. At Cape 
Henlopen High School, he excelled academically and served as the 
student body president. He won several public speaking contests, 
demonstrating rhetorical prowess that would soon lead him to argue 
landmark cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Stevenson would go on 
to earn a J.D. and M.P.P. from Harvard University and the position of 
Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
  In 1989, Mr. Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a 
non-profit based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal 
representation to wrongly convicted prisoners, especially Alabama 
prisoners on death row. One of EJI's first clients was Walter 
McMillian, a Black man convicted and sentenced to death for the murder 
of a young white woman. Due to Mr. Stevenson's systematic dismantling 
of the prosecution's case, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruled 
that Mr. McMillian's conviction was unconstitutional. The State of 
Alabama finally dropped charges after mounting evidence proved Mr. 
McMillian's innocence. On March 3, 1993, Mr. McMillian was released 
from death row and walked out of a courtroom a free man. At the time, 
Mr. McMillian was one of the first to be exonerated from death row 
since the end of the civil rights movement. Since Mr. McMillian was 
exonerated, Mr. Stevenson and EJI prevented more than 130 people from 
receiving the death penalty.
  Mr. Stevenson personally argued several cases before the Supreme 
Court and won major landmark decisions reshaping American 
jurisprudence. In the 2012 case, Miller v Alabama, Mr. Stevenson 
successfully argued that the imposition of a mandatory life-sentence-
without-parole for a juvenile violates the 8th Amendment prohibition 
against cruel and unusual punishment. In the 2019 case, Madison v. 
Alabama, Mr. Stevenson successfully secured a ruling that would protect 
prisoners who suffer from dementia from execution. These cases before 
the Supreme Court demonstrate Mr. Stevenson's commitment to equity in 
the criminal justice system and prove that Mr. Stevenson is one of 
America's best public interest attorneys.
  Yet the good works of Mr. Stevenson were not confined to his 
successes in the courtroom. In 2018, Mr. Stevenson and EJI opened two 
new museums in Montgomery to chronicle the legacy of slavery and racial 
segregation. The Legacy Museum chronicled the post-slavery evolution of 
racial violence in sharecropping, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. The 
National Memorial for Peace and Justice records the names of 4,400 
victims of lynchings from 1877 through 1950. Through EJI, he launched 
major efforts to address the legacy of slavery in America. EJI has 
published several studies on racial violence and inequities in the law 
and state constitutions, including the highly influential Lynching in 
America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. He also brought 
public attention to the racial injustices of the U.S. legal system as 
the author of the bestselling 2015 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of 
Justice and Redemption and adapted into the 2019 film, Just Mercy. Both 
the memoir and film received significant awards and nominations, 
including NAACP Image Awards, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence 
in Nonfiction, and the nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Male 
Actor in a Supporting Role at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards.
  On October 8, 2022, I will have the privilege to join the Town of 
Milton and the Milton Community Foundation to honor the selfless 
dedication of Mr. Stevenson. Our country is so blessed to have him as a 
steward of justice. As he has so eloquently said--we all have a 
responsibility to create a just society. How fortunate we are to have 
Bryan Stevenson as our leader of that movement.

                          ____________________