SAN JOSE, CA – Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson spoke in San Jose this past week to an audience of Santa Clara County prosecutors, law officials, leaders of law enforcement from San Francisco and Contra Costa counties, and elected officials at the invitation of Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen.
An acclaimed civil rights attorney and an advocate against capital punishment, according to the Mercury News, Bryan Stevenson examined the scope of legal punishment and rehabilitation, championing a restorative approach to law rather than one that simply reduces the level of crime.
Crediting his enslaved great-grandparents for inspiring his political perspective, Stevenson urged his audience of law enforcement officers to see people not as their crimes, but as people, the Mercury News reported.
Stevenson stressed his great-grandparents hoped for freedom when the notion was ridiculed. Standing on the legacy of his ancestry, he maintained “this is not a time to become hopeless,” the Mercury News wrote, adding that over the last 40 years, Stevenson aided in the overturning of more than 100 wrongful convictions that led to the death penalty.
Emphasizing the necessity to see people as “more than crimes” in his speech, Stevenson noted the necessity to focus on addressing substance abuse not as crimes, but as medical concerns, and to bar the treatment of convicted youth as adults.
According to the Mercury News, Stevenson founded the Montgomery, the Equal Justice Initiative based in Alabama, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—otherwise known as the National Lynching Memorial.
After his visit to the memorial, the Mercury News said, DA Rosen decided to void his office of seeking the death penalty as a soluble punishment for a crime in 2020, emphasizing the racial prejudice embedded in the practice of capital punishment.
Stevenson, as reported by the newspaper, estimates one in eight death sentences result in a wrongful conviction, meaning 12 percent, at least, of people are executed without proof of guilt. In his speech, he demanded an approach of “compassion and conviction,” rather than “the politics of fear.”
Referencing the Trump Administration and its attempts to undermine the rule of law, the Constitution, and the courts, Stevenson asked law enforcers and justice officials to be loud and seen as the “historic protectors of the rule of law,” wrote the Mercury News, adding Stevenson concluded by asking if the elected bodies refuse to oblige to the courts and the rule of law, “why should anybody?”
