Friday Keynote Presentation: Lead with Courage
Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
Bryan Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges, eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.
Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who have dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. He and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.
Stevenson has led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites in Montgomery, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.
Stevenson’s work has won him numerous awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” prize; the ABA Medal, the American Bar Association’s highest honor; and the Olaf Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden, for international human rights. In 2018, he received the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize from the King Center in Atlanta. In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden.
Stevenson is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Just Mercy. In 2019, the memoir was adapted into a major motion picture. Stevenson also is the subject of the Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary True Justice. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government.