00:00:01
Phoebe Judge: Hi, it’s Phoebe. We’ve wanted to sit down with Bryan Stevenson
for a long time.
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He’s been working with inmates on death
row for 30 years, and has seen a side of the
00:00:09
criminal justice system few of us can. Doing this show for the past couple of years,
we’ve had a lot of time to think about many
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of the issues he deals with every day. So today, maybe something a little different:
the interview I had with him a couple of weeks
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ago. Here’s the show. Bryan Stevenson: You know, there’s no humane
way to kill a fully healthy human being, someone
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who is not physically ill, without trauma,
without suffering. It’s not just the method of execution.
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I’ve been with people in the hours before
and execution and it is — it can only be
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described as surreal. Phoebe Judge: The first time Bryan Stevenson
met someone on death row, he was a Harvard
00:00:50
Law student. He’d been struggling in law school — he
says he didn’t really like Harvard and he
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didn’t even know if he liked the idea of
being a lawyer. But then he got an internship with a group
called the Southern Prisoner’s Defense Committee,
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and they sent him, all by himself, to a maximum
security prison outside of Atlanta to deliver
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a message to an inmate. Bryan Stevenson: And they said, “Just explain
to him that he’s not at risk of execution
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anytime in the next year.” And I was so convinced that he would be disappointed
to meet someone who was just a law student,
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I tried to rehearse carefully what I would
say. But when I got to death row and I was back
in that visitation room, I was so overwhelmed,
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and they kept me back there a while. And when they finally opened the door, there
stood the first condemned prisoner I’d ever
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seen, and my image of him was shaped by the
chains he was wearing. He had handcuffs on his wrists, a chain around
his waist, shackles on his ankles, and it
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took them almost 15 minutes to unchain him,
and by the time he walked in, I was so overwhelmed
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I just started apologizing. I said, “I’m so sorry, I’m just a law
student. I don’t know anything about criminal procedure,
I don’t know anything about the death penalty,
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I don’t know anything about civil procedure
or public procedure, but they did send me
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down here to tell you you’re not at risk
of execution any time in the next year.”
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And as soon as I said that the man said, “Wait,
wait, wait, say that again.” I said, “you’re not at risk of execution
anytime in the next year.”
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And the man said, “Wait, wait, say that
again.” And I said, “You’re not at risk of execution
anytime in the next year.”
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And that man grabbed my hand and he said,
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He said, “You’re the first person I’ve
met in the two years that I’ve been on death
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row who’s not a death row prisoner or a
death row guard.” He said, “I’ve been talking to my wife
and my kids over the phone, but I haven’t
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let them come and visit because I was afraid
I’d have an execution date.” He said, “Now, because of you, I’m going
to see my wife, I’m going to see my kids.”
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And I couldn’t believe how even in my ignorance,
that being proximate could have an impact
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on the quality of someone’s life, and we
started talking, this man and me, and I was
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the first person of color who was part of
a legal team that he had met. He knew I was going to Harvard, he was very
intrigued by that.
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And so he asked me a lot of questions, and
then I asked him some questions, and it just
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turned out that we weren’t that different. We both had grandmothers that had been formative
in our lives.
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We both had experienced segregation and discrimination. We both understood that the system wasn’t
going to be always fair or just.
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And I think he was so genuinely interested
in me that it was very easy for me to be genuinely
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interested in him. And we just started talking, and then we fell
into one of these conversations that felt
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very familiar. Phoebe Judge: Finally, after three hours,
the guards came in to take the man back to
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his cell. Bryan Stevenson said the guards treated the
man roughly, putting tight shackles on his
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ankles and a chain around his waist. Bryan Stevenson: And I tried to get them to
be gentler, but they ignored me.
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The condemned man said to me, he said, “Bryan,
don’t you worry about this, you just come
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back.” And then they started shoving this man towards
the door, he almost fell down, and they were
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about to push
him out of the room, when I watched the man plant his feet, and just before they could
push him out of the room, the next time when
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they shoved him he didn’t move. And then he turned to me and said, “Bryan
don’t worry about this, you just come back.”
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And then that man did something I’ve never
forgotten, he closed his eyes, he threw his
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head back, and he began to sing. And he started singing, “I’m pressing
on the upward way / New heights I’m gaining
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every day / Still praying as I’m onward
bound.” And then he said, “Lord plant my feet on
higher ground.”
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And I hadn’t heard the song in quite a while
before that man sang it, but I’ve never
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forgotten it since. [The gospel song plays.] Phoebe Judge: Right then, Bryan Stevenson
says he knew, at 23 years old, exactly what
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he wanted to do with his life. I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal. [Gospel music continues]
A
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few years later, on a Saturday morning in
1987, an 18-year-old white woman named Ronda
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Morrison opened the dry cleaners where she
worked in Monroeville, Alabama. At 10:45 a.m., customers came into the store
and couldn’t find anyone working there.
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They looked around and found Ronda Morrison’s
body on the floor. An autopsy later found three bullets in Ronda’s
body, one which had been fired at close range.
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For seven months the murder remained unsolved,
and then a man stepped forward and said that
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he knew who killed Ronda Morrison. He said that he’d seen an African-American
man named Walter McMillan near the victim’s
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body with money in his hands. Bryan Stevenson: And we believe they chose
to arrest Mr. McMillan not because he had
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a prior crime history, he didn’t. We believe they chose him because he was having
an interracial affair with a young white woman
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who was related to one of the officers, and
that affair was what brought him to the attention
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of the police. And so they arrested him and charged him with
this murder, despite the fact that at the
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time of the crime, some 11 miles away, he
was raising money for his sister’s church.
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There were dozens of people with him at the
exact time of the crime, miles from it.
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And they went to the police, they went to
the sheriff, they said, “You’ve got the
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wrong man, we were with him when this crime
took place, there’s no way he committed
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this crime.” But they were ignored. They actually put Mr. McMillan on death row
for 15 months pretrial.
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It’s the only case I’ve ever worked on
where the client spent 15 months awaiting
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trial on death row. And the irony for me is that this community,
where this crime took place, where this trial
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took place, is the very same community where
Harper Lee grew up and wrote the beloved American
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novel To Kill a Mockingbird. And people in that community love To Kill
a Mockingbird.
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They put
on plays about it, they name streets after characters, they have stores named after it,
they’ve dedicated a museum to it, they are
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preoccupied with the story of To Kill a Mockingbird. But they were completely indifferent to the
plight of an innocent Black man being wrongly
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convicted and condemned. Phoebe Judge: Walter McMillan was charged
with murder, and the trial was moved to the
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primarily white Baldwin County. It lasted a day and a half. The jury found him guilty and sentenced him
to life in prison.
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And then, the judge overrode the jury’s
sentence of life in prison and gave Walter
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McMillan the death penalty. Bryan Stevenson: I got involved in the case,
and we started investigating, and quickly
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came up with some very powerful evidence of
Mr. McMillan’s innocence. They had coerced witnesses to testify falsely
against him, and for some bizarre reason they
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didn’t just coerce these witnesses to testify
falsely, they tape-recorded the sessions when
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they were coercing these false statements. And even more bizarre, they didn’t destroy
the tapes until we actually got our hands
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on these tapes, where the main witness against
Mr. McMillan was saying, “You want me to
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frame an innocent man for murder, and I don’t
feel right about that.” And the police officer says,“Well, if you
don’t give us what we want, we’ll put
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you on death row.” And it went on like that for minutes. And so we got these tapes, and we got the
witnesses to admit that their trial testimony
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was false, we uncovered other evidence to
prove Mr. McMillan’s innocence, it was time
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to go to court. And I was really moved by the fact that on
the first day of the hearings, the entire
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Black community showed up, poor people from
their region showed up. And at the end of that first day in court,
after we put all of the evidence about these
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tapes and other pieces of evidence, I saw
hope growing in that community. And then the next day, when I came back to
court, I noticed that all the people of color
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were sitting outside the courtroom, they weren’t
coming inside. And I went up to the community’s leaders
and I said, “Well, why aren’t y’all
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inside?” And they said, “They won’t let us in today.” And I went over to the deputy sheriff to go
into the courtroom, and I said, “I want
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to go inside the courtroom.” And he said, “You can’t come in.” I said, “I’m the defense attorney, I think
I have to be able to come in.”
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And the deputy looked worried and said, “Well
let me go check,” and he ran inside the
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courtroom. Then he came back, and he said, “Well, you
can come in.” And on the second day they changed the courtroom
around.
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They placed a metal detector that you had
to walk through to get inside the courtroom,
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and on the other side of the metal detector
they had positioned this huge German shepherd
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dog that you had to walk past. And I was angry because the courtroom had
been filled, half filled with people who were
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supporting the prosecution. They were letting other people in, but not
people of color.
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And I complained bitterly to the judge, and
the judge said, “Well, your people have
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to get here earlier
tomorrow.” I said, “That’s not the problem, judge. They wouldn’t let them in.”
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But I went to the community leaders and explained
what had happened and they said, “That’s
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OK, Mr. Stevenson, we will be here earlier
tomorrow.” And that’s when they began identifying older
people of color to be representatives for
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the few remaining seats in the courtroom. And they identified this older Black woman
by the name of Ms. Williams, and she was so
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proud to be given this responsibility. You know, she fixed herself up, she got her
hat together, and she started walking towards
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the courtroom, and they finally let people
of color come inside. And I was inside when I watched this beautiful
older Black woman walk through the door, walk
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through the metal detector, and then walk
up to that dog. But when she saw the dog you could see fear
paralyze her.
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She stopped dead in her tracks, her body began
to shake, her shoulders dropped, tears started
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running down her face, and I was standing
there watching her while her whole body trembled.
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And then I heard her groan really loudly and
watched her turn around and run out the courtroom.
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It was a painful thing to see. Other people came inside, we had another good
day in court, I’d forgotten all about Ms.
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Williams until I was going to my car that
night. But she was sitting outside when I saw her.
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She came over to me and she said, “Mr. Stevenson,
I feel so bad,” and she said, “I let you
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down today.” I said, “No, Ms. Williams, it’s all right,
it’s OK, it’s not your fault.
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They shouldn’t have done what they did.” She said, “No, Mr. Stevenson. You don’t understand, I was meant to be
in that courtroom, I should have been in that
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courtroom.” And she started to cry, and I couldn’t console
her. She said, “Mr. Stevenson, I feel so bad.”
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She said, “I wanted to be in there so bad
but when I saw that dog, all I could think
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about was Selma, Alabama, 1965. I remember how we gathered at the Edmund-Pettus
Bridge to march to Montgomery for the right
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to vote. I remember how they beat us, and I remember
those dogs, and I wanted to move, I tried
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to move but I just couldn’t do it.” And she walked away with tears running down
her face.
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The next day I was back at court and her sister
told me that that night Ms. Williams didn’t
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talk to anybody, they didn’t hear her say
anything, she didn’t eat. They said they could just hear her in her
room praying all night long.
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She was praying, “Lord, I can’t be scared
of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.”
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And the next morning, Ms. Williams got up
and she called the community leaders and asked
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them for another chance to be a witness. And on the trip from the house to the courthouse,
she kept saying over and over again, “I
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ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared
of no dog.” And I was standing there talking to her sister
when Ms. Williams finally got to the courtroom.
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And you could hear her saying over and over
again, audibly, she was saying, “I ain’t scared
of no dog.”
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And I watched this beautiful older Black woman
walk through the metal detector, walk up to
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this dog, say in a very loud voice, she said,
“I ain’t scared of no dog,” and she
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walked past the dog, sat down on the front
row of that courtroom, and she turned to me
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and said, “Mr. Stevenson, I’m here.” And I looked at her and said, “Ms. Williams,
it is so good to see you here.”
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And I started getting my papers ready, and
then she said it again, she said, “No Mr.
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Stevenson you didn’t hear me,” she said,
“I’m here.” And I looked at her and I said, “No, Ms.
Williams, I did see you I’m, I’m glad
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to see you here.” I was a little embarrassed. The courtroom got packed full of people, the
judge walked in, everybody stood up and everybody
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sat back down, except Ms. Williams. And I turned around, and she said one last
time in a very loud voice, she said, “I’m
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here.” And it became clear to me what she was saying. What she was saying wasn’t that, “I’m
physically present,” she wasn’t saying,
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“I’m physically here.” What she was saying was, “I may be old,
I may be poor, I may be Black, but I’m here
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because I’ve got this vision of justice
that compels me to stand up to injustice.”
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And for me that’s when the case turned. That’s when I knew we were going to prevail.
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It is that kind of witness that has ultimately
motivated me to see that it is not the power
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that you bring, it’s not the wealth, it’s
not the status, it is the heart and the hope
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that ultimately allows us to achieve justice
in cases like this. Phoebe Judge: And they won.
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Walter McMillan was exonerated and lived the
rest of his life a free man. He died in 2013.
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At only 29 years old, Bryan Stevenson rented
an old house in Montgomery, Alabama, and opened
00:14:05
what would later become the Equal Justice
Initiative. He chose Alabama because it had, and still
has, one of the highest execution rates in
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the country, and extremely limited resources
for public defenders. As soon as he opened the practice, he got
a call from a man who had 30 days left.
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Bryan Stevenson: And I had to say to him,
“I’m sorry, we don’t have books, we don’t have staff, we don’t have resources.
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I can’t take any cases just now.” And he was so heartbroken when I said that
that he didn’t say another word.
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And the next thing I knew he hung up the phone,
and I was just holding the phone in anguish,
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couldn’t sleep much that night. And he called me the next day and he begged
me, he said, “Mr. Stevenson I know you don’t
00:14:43
have your books, I know you don’t have your
staff,” he said, “but please tell me you’ll
00:14:47
take my case.” He said, “You don’t have to tell me that
you can get a stay, you don’t have to tell
00:14:50
me you can stop the execution, but please
tell me you’ll fight for me.” He said, “I don’t think I can make it
these next 29 days if there’s no hope at
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all.” And when he put it like that, I had to say
yes, and we tried very hard to get a stay
00:15:03
of execution. But every court we went to said “too late.” And on the night this man was scheduled to
be executed, I got that dreadful call from
00:15:09
the Supreme Court telling me that our last
stay motion had been denied. And I drove down to Atmore, Alabama, to be
with this man before the execution... and
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it was surreal. We had this very emotional, very difficult
moment. We were holding hands, we were praying, we
were talking, we were crying.
00:15:28
And then he said something to me I’ve never
forgotten, he said, “Bryan, it’s been
00:15:31
such a strange day.” He said, “All day long people have been
asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’”
00:15:38
He said, “When I woke up this morning the
guards came to me and they said, ‘What can
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we get you for breakfast?’ At midday they came to me and said, ‘What
can we get you for lunch?’
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In the evening they came to me and said, ‘What
can we get you for dinner?’” He said, “All day long people have been
saying, ‘What can I do to help you?
00:15:50
Can I get you coffee? Can I get you water? Can I get you stamps? Can I get you letters?
00:15:54
Can I get you the phone?’” And I never will forget that man saying in
those last few minutes, he said, “Bryan,
00:15:58
it’s been so strang.” He said, “More people have said, ‘What
can I do to help you?’ in the last 14 hours
00:16:05
of my life than they ever did in the first
19 years of my life.” And it is the anguish of some of those moments
that make me appreciate why it is so necessary
00:16:19
that we do better when it comes to human rights
in this country, when it comes to justice.
00:16:24
I don’t think the death penalty in America
can be resolved by asking whether people deserve
00:16:29
to die for
the crimes they commit. I think the threshold question is, do we deserve
to kill?
00:16:35
We make terrible mistakes. We’ve now, I just got one, the release of
a man a year ago who was the 156th person
00:16:43
exonerated, released from death row after
being proven innocent. That being said, for every nine people we’ve
executed in this country, we’ve now identified
00:16:51
one innocent person on death row. It is a shameful rate of error. If for every nine planes that took off one
crashed, no one would fly.
00:16:59
Phoebe Judge: Have you met anyone in all of
your time who you’ve thought is evil, who
00:17:08
you’ve thought, “I don’t wanna waste
my time saving this person”? Bryan Stevenson: No.
00:17:14
I mean, I’ve met people who are severely
mentally ill. I’ve met people for whom it’s probably
likely that they will never be able to get
00:17:24
out of prison because they are dealing with
disabilities or challenges that won’t make
00:17:27
it safe for them to get out of jail or prison. But I’ve never met anybody who I think is
beyond hope, or beyond redemption, or whose
00:17:35
life doesn’t matter. I think, you know, we have to judge our commitment
to the rule of law.
00:17:42
Our commitment to human rights can’t be
measured by how we treat people who impress
00:17:48
us, by how we treat people who we like, how
we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged.
00:17:54
We have to judge our commitment to justice,
to the rule of law, to human rights, by not
00:17:58
looking at how we treat the rich and the powerful
and the privileged, we have to look at how
00:18:01
we treat the disfavored, the disabled, the
condemned. I mean, it’s easy to be just to people you
like, people you favor.
00:18:09
It’s easy to be compassionate towards people
who you have a lot of respect for, but it’s
00:18:14
not really mercy if you give it to the people
who deserve it. Mercy is mercy when it’s given to the undeserving.
00:18:22
And so I’ve never met anybody about whom
I should say, “Oh, no, they can’t get mercy.
00:18:27
They don’t deserve it.” It’s — that’s what mercy is about. And I don’t think that I have some special
insight or anything.
00:18:33
I think that if anyone saw what I saw on a
regular basis, if they could see what I see,
00:18:39
if they could hear what I hear, if they could
understand what I understand about what we’re
00:18:43
doing, I think that they would be motivated
to do the exact same thing. I think they’d want to end mass incarceration.
00:18:47
I think they’d want to stop
this extreme, excessive, cruel punishment. I think they would want more hope and more
mercy and more justice.
00:18:55
Phoebe Judge: Your grandfather was murdered. Bryan Stevenson: That’s right. When I was 16, my grandfather was stabbed
to death in Philadelphia by several young
00:19:07
men who broke into his apartment and tried
to steal a TV, and it was devastating to our
00:19:14
family. My mother was grief stricken. My grandfather had nine children. I had lots of cousins, many of whom were actually
working for the police department, and it
00:19:31
was deeply, deeply challenging to imagine
this 86-year-old man being stabbed to death
00:19:41
by a lot of reckless young teens. But what was fascinating was what my grandmother,
she was less interested in what punishment
00:19:49
these young men would receive, she wanted
to talk about why or how anyone could be in
00:19:54
a place in life that they would think that
that’s something that they could do. And if she could do anything, she wanted to
create a world where children didn’t run
00:20:02
around stabbing old men in low-income projects
just for a TV. And she wanted us to look beyond these young
men and try to understand something more important
00:20:15
about what’s happening in a world where
kids are born into violent families, they
00:20:20
live in violent neighborhoods, they go to
violent schools, and become violent people
00:20:23
by the time they’re teenagers, and how do
we change that kind of world? And that’s motivated my work as much as
anything.
00:20:30
Phoebe Judge: It’s been interesting doing
this show about crime. I’ve spoken with so many people who I guess
could be judged from the outside as “bad.”
00:20:41
Like they’re a bad person, murderers and
things like that. And I’ve never got that sense speaking to
someone, coming away from them that this is
00:20:49
a bad person. I’ve only come away with a sense of: how
did they get there? You know, how did someone get there, not that
they’ve ended up and they’ve crossed the
00:20:58
line. I think that that line — people believe
if you've crossed the line, you can never
00:21:02
come back, you’re bad now — just is invisible,
there’s so many other things. Bryan Stevenson: Well, I think that’s right.
00:21:08
I mean, if we spent more time trying to understand
how it is that people came to these decisions
00:21:14
and why, then we could do so much more to
disrupt, to reduce crime, to actually create
00:21:20
public safety. You know, in other cultures, in other countries,
in Scandinavia, they think of crime as disorder.
00:21:26
And when someone is arrested for crime they
really want to help that person recover.
00:21:31
Punishment for the sake of punishment doesn’t
make a lot of sense. There is this idea that rehabilitation is
necessary recovery.
00:21:39
And what’s ironic is that we all want rehabilitation
when we make mistakes. None of us want to be judged by our worst
act.
00:21:46
When we make mistakes, we want a chance to
show we’re not just that mistake. And yet we’ve created a system that is so
unforgiving, that is so judgmental.
00:21:55
And it’s intoxicating to imagine all of
these evil people that we can all organize
00:22:01
and beat up on and go to war against. But it’s dishonest. And one of the great challenges that I think
we have in this country is to revive a conversation
00:22:10
about what it means to recover. You know, we don’t give justice to people
just because we want to be fair to them, we
00:22:16
give justice to people because we want to
be just. We don’t give mercy to people because some
people need mercy.
00:22:23
We give mercy to people because we want and
need to be merciful. Our strength, our humanity, our dignity turns
on how we treat other people, including people
00:22:32
who have committed crimes, including people
who have fallen down. And I ultimately think that if we’re going
to evolve as a species, our capacity to talk
00:22:43
and think about rehabilitation, about recovery,
about redemption, is essential. A world where we only hit back when we are
hit, where we only judge who have judged us,
00:22:52
where we only hurt those who hurt us, is a
world that is destined to die. And if we believe in life, if we believe in
a future, we’re gonna have to get past that.
00:23:00
And crime is a space where we have fallen
down, where we’ve allowed the narrative
00:23:04
of fear and anger to take over our thinking,
and I want to push back against that.
00:23:08
I think that the one thing I’d say is that
we can’t make decisions rooted in fear and
00:23:12
anger when we’re trying to deal with crime,
or justice, or even what it means to be just.
00:23:20
Phoebe Judge: So far, Bryan Stevenson has
gotten 125 people off of death row. [Music.]
00:23:38
Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer and
me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Russ Henry.
00:23:46
Julienne Alexander makes original illustrations
for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where
we’ve got a link to Bryan Stevenson’s
00:23:55
book, Just Mercy. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North
Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.
00:24:02
We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,
a collective of the best podcasts around.
00:24:08
Shows like “The Allusionist,” made by
our friend, Helen Zaltzman. Not only does she take us into the history
of how we use language, but also shows us
00:24:17
how a word as obvious-seeming as “please”
can have different connotations in different
00:24:22
countries, or how one so-called “bad word”
comes to be worse than another. It’s really funny and smart.
00:24:28
That’s “The Allusionist” with an ‘A.’ We learn something every time. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight
Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity,
00:24:40
chaos, and teamwork. I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal
Jingle: Radiotopia, from PRX.