1 in 8 people on death row is innocent! with Bryan Stevenson | ReThinking

1. 0:00 – 1:33

   Segregated childhood and discovering the power of law to open doors

   1. BSBryan Stevenson0:00

      Working with the poor, working with people who are excluded, working with folks who are experiencing so much hardship, it just became clear to me that wealth wasn't the answer. I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is justice. [upbeat music]

   2. AGAdam Grant0:20

      I have a lot that I'm excited to talk about today. I think for me, the opening that I've never gotten to ask you is how did you become passionate about, first of all, law, and second of all, rescuing people from death row?

   3. BSBryan Stevenson0:32

      I think even before I appreciated the structure of society or any of those big things, I realized that lawyers and law can make a huge difference. Growing up in a community that was racially segregated, where Black people were isolated and marginalized, the schools were segregated, churches were seg- segregated, parks were segregated, the beach was segregated. I was surrounded by adults who didn't have high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hardworking, but there were literally no high schools for Black people in our county when my dad was a teenager. And then these lawyers came into our community. I started my education in a colored school, but the lawyers came in and made them open up the public schools. And even though the county was 80% white and 20% Black, and even if you had to vote, we would've lost the vote on whether Black kids could go to the public schools. These lawyers had the ability to make them open up the public schools, and as a result of that, I got to go to high school.

2. 1:33 – 3:06

   From philosophy major to legal advocate: choosing law as a tool for structural change

   1. BSBryan Stevenson1:33

      I went to college. I went to law school. Honestly, I was a first-generation college student. I was majoring in philosophy, and during my senior year, somebody came up to me and said, "Bryan, I hope you know that nobody's gonna pay you to philosophize when you graduate from college."

   2. AGAdam Grant1:48

      [laughs]

   3. BSBryan Stevenson1:48

      And it created this panic moment and-

   4. AGAdam Grant1:51

      Little did they know.

   5. BSBryan Stevenson1:53

      Little did they know, uh, but I started-

   6. AGAdam Grant1:55

      [laughs]

   7. BSBryan Stevenson1:55

      ... looking into graduate programs. So I kept looking, and honestly, that's how I found my way to law school. I knew that there was power in the law to push for change, to create new structures, new systems, new realities for people. And I didn't formally understand it when [laughs] I was in the second grade and the public schools opened up, but I began to appreciate that beyond politics, beyond other forms of power, the rule of law can actually require people to do things that they don't really wanna do, that they would otherwise not do. And of course, I went there with a burden for the poor, for the excluded, the marginalized, people like the people I grew up with. And graduating and beginning to represent people who were disfavored and condemned, it just became clear to me that the only way we're gonna really help the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable people in our society, the people who are disfavored, the people who are marginalized, was to kinda create a framework of rights. And that really does relate back to that childhood experience of seeing lawyers literally open up schoolhouses that had been closed for 100 years to people in my community.

3. 3:06 – 4:49

   “The opposite of poverty is justice”: reframing what ends deprivation

   1. AGAdam Grant3:06

      It's amazing. Well, I've, I've admired your work for a long time, and I think probably the first time that I, I read you, you just right out of the gate changed my mind about what the opposite of poverty is. Talk to me about that.

   2. BSBryan Stevenson3:19

      Yeah. I think working with the poor, working with people who are excluded, it just became clear to me that wealth wasn't the answer. Uh, so many of the people that I represent who are poor and excluded are poor and excluded because they've been treated unfairly. They've been created, treated unjustly. We've created systems that don't work well for people coming out of some of these spaces. And so that's what really led me to just kind of reflect on this idea that the opposite of poverty isn't wealth. I think sometimes we talk too much about money in America. I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is justice, and when we do justice, when we create conditions that help create opportunities without barriers, when we create systems that treat people fairly without regard to their race or their gender or their ethnicity, when we actually allow access to the things that everybody wants access to to thrive, we create a world that is more just, and I think we then reduce the amount of poverty, reduce the amount of scarcity, reduce the amount of suffering in so doing. And so rather than just all of us thinking we just need more wealth, I, I, I think there's a place that we have to create where we think we need more justice, where doing justice becomes an even greater priority than just promoting wealth. Doing justice becomes a bigger priority than, uh, creating systems of supply here and, and meeting a demand there.

4. 4:49 – 9:16

   Hope as a discipline: why the moral arc bends only when people keep pushing

   1. AGAdam Grant4:49

      Bryan, you've, uh, you've, I think, referenced in times when, when people are losing hope for progress, you've referenced Martin Luther King and the observation that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It seems to a lot of people like the arc is bending away from justice right now. What do you say to that, and how do you maintain hope?

   2. BSBryan Stevenson5:07

      Well, I don't think I believe that the arc is bending away from justice. I certainly think we're in a difficult period, um, but it's never been a straight line, you know? My great-grandparents were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia, and despite the fact that it was against the law for enslaved people to learn to read or write, my great-grandfather had a hope of freedom, uh, that was so great, he risked his life to learn how to read or write. In the 1850s as a teenager, he didn't know that a, a civil war was coming in the next decade. And I think that hope is the anecdote to these shifts. But, um, you know, for, for emanci- 4 million people were emancipated after the Civil War, they thought everything was gonna be great. Well, it wasn't. There was kind of this collapse of reconstruction. There was a lynching. There was sharecropping and tenant farming. Convict leasing meant that people were effectively put back in bondage, and it could have seemed then, uh, that the moral arc is not moving, but through determination, through continued commitment to building churches and schools and families, we got to the point where that was no longer tolerated. I, uh, I, I live in Montgomery, Alabama. It's a community that has been dominated by, uh, decades of, of racial segregation. George Wallace said in 1963, "Segregation forever. Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." But people had a hope that we could get past that. And now, uh, we've been able to tear down that legal architecture of Jim Crow and segregation. And so I, I, think there is a forward progress. That doesn't mean that there won't be counter-narratives along the way. When abolitionists tried to end slavery, uh, enslavers said, "Oh no, we're gonna make it illegal for anybody to possess abolitionist literature." So they would put white people in prison for having abolitionist literature in slave states. They would punish or even execute enslaved people. There was a counter-narrative. There was a struggle. There was a civil war, and it didn't always look like the Union forces would prevail. Uh, during the time of lynching, Ida B. Wells and many others were pushing back against that horrid institution, but it continued for many decades. It was a narrative struggle. During the Civil Rights era, it wasn't that everybody just said, "Okay, Dr. King, you're right. Uh, we, [laughs] we need to open up our hearts and minds. We need to embrace your dream." They were intensely oppositional to it. They killed people to maintain segregation. They, they beat people to maintain segregation. I mean, living where I live, I walk these streets and am mindful of the fact that the generation before me would put on their Sunday best. They'd go places to push for the right to vote, push f- for the right to be treated equally. They'd be on their knees praying, and they'd get battered and bloodied and beaten. And yet they had enough hope to go back home and wipe the blood off and change their clothes and do it again. The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice when people embrace the hope that is needed for the struggle for justice to continue. And that's why I am still persuaded, uh, that we are moving toward that, and I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice. And so if I care about justice, I cannot afford to become hopeless in this context. Our hope is our superpower. It is the thing that causes many of us, uh, to stand when people say sit down, to speak when people say be quiet. I am the product of generations of hopeful people. Wouldn't be here if they hadn't had enough hope, including my enslaved great-grandparents, to learn to read and to pass that knowledge along. So I just think that has to be the way we face the moment that we are in, and when we do that, and when more of us do that, it becomes easier for everyone. The pathway becomes a little straighter. Uh, you know, the valleys are a little less overwhelming. The mountains are a little less intimidating. Uh, and we're just in a moment right now where we have to gather the forces needed, uh, to feel that movement toward progress, movement toward justice.

5. 9:16 – 15:16

   Why innocent people still end up on death row: fear, distance, and unequal valuation of suffering

   1. AGAdam Grant9:16

      I have so many questions for you about how to, how to create the world that you envision 'cause it sometimes seems like we're a long way off, and I think probably nowhere is that clearer than the work that you do on death row. Uh, it's, it's just, as an outsider, it's unfathomable to me that somebody who is innocent could be condemned to death. That it just seems completely barbaric.

   2. BSBryan Stevenson9:39

      Yeah.

   3. AGAdam Grant9:40

      Can you, can you help me make sense of why that still happens at all?

   4. BSBryan Stevenson9:43

      Well, I think it's an important question, and I'm glad you pose it, Adam, because I think we haven't asked that question enough of our policymakers, of our elected officials, of the people who manage our legal system. They're never questioned about how fair it is, how reliable it is, and the absence of any questioning means that they don't think much about, uh, creating a more reliable system. I think it happens for three reasons. Number one, we have, throughout our history, given in to what I call the politics of fear and anger from time to time. And we don't have to agree on policy issues. We don't have to agree on a lot of things, but there are narratives that feed bigotry, that feed violence, that feed hatred, that feed inequality and injustice. I believe when people allow themselves to be governed by fear and anger, they start tolerating things they should never tolerate. They start accepting things they should never accept. And so in too many of our places, we accept that we have a legal system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. We accept that we have a legal system that makes enormous number of errors, and it's in part because we're allowing fear and anger about crime or fear of crime to shape our decisions. And that has certainly happened here in the United States. Um, until the 1970s, we had a relatively stable prison population in this country. Then in the '70s, you had politicians from both political parties arguing that people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminals who should be punished for their addiction and drug dependency, even though if we had recognized that addiction and drug dependency is a health problem and responded using a health analysis, we could have spared ourselves a lot of cost, a lot of suffering, a lot of, uh, disruption to, uh, communities and lives. But we allowed that fear and anger frame to, to set things. And so similarly Uh, we got into this spiral where we were competing with one another at the political level on who could be the toughest, who could be the most extreme in their sentencing. And so these narratives have given rise to an environment where reliability, fairness, and even innocence is not the priority when it comes to how we treat people. Another part of that narrative is just the way we debate and make these decisions. I am persuaded that we appreciate and believe in proximity in most areas of life. So when it comes to innovation, technologists know that they have to understand things intimately to be able to do something better, to enhance things. Business people know that to be good investors, you have to understand everything that impacts, uh, supply and demand. And we have this built-in commitment to proximity in so many areas, in medicine, in science, in journalism. But with regard to justice, too many people think that they can shape what is a just system, uh, when they're not close to the people who are experiencing injustice, when they're not close to the people who are gonna be directly impacted. And that allows the debates and the policy discussions to get, I think, hijacked by these false notions. And so for example, in the policy area, when somebody says, "Well, this crime of burglary, or this crime of child pornography, this crime of, of, of drug trafficking, uh, I hate those crimes, so I wanna give that 40 years and 60 years and 80 years." And they talk as if they can put crimes in prison. But the truth, of course, is that we cannot put a crime in prison. We can only put a person in prison, and people are not crimes. They can commit crimes, and we can hold them accountable for the crimes they've committed, but if we don't hold in our head the difference between a person and a crime, we'll create punishments that are cruel. We'll create punishments that are extreme. We'll create punishments that are flawed by our preoccupation with extreme punishment, even if that comes at the risk of convicting people who are innocent. That narrative challenge is, I think, the first part of how we get this. The second part has to do with just the very politicized nature of our legal system, and the way in which the people who have the most responsibility for making sure that we only put people who are guilty in jails and prisons are the people who are the least accountable, uh, when we actually make mistakes. And so we don't hold judges accountable for the mistakes they make when innocent people are convicted. We don't hold prosecutors accountable. We don't really hold police accountable. It becomes the burden of the condemned, of the person who's been convicted to prove their innocence, and then when they are exonerated, half the states of this country do not acknowledge that by even giving them compensation for that wrongful error. So we've made it far too easy, in my judgment, to convict people who are innocent, to imprison people who shouldn't be in prison, to punish people unfairly, and then done very little to respond to that, even when the evidence is pretty dramatic. The third thing is that, um, because of our history of racial inequality, of, uh, disfavoring the poor, we just don't value the suffering of all people equally. And that problem of valuing the suffering of some people less than the suffering of other people just makes us indifferent to the problems of unreliable prosecution, erroneous prosecution. Most people think, "Well, yeah, we probably do have some innocent people on death row," or, "Yeah, we probably do have a lot

6. 15:16 – 16:51

   The one-in-eight scandal: error rates we’d never accept anywhere else

   1. BSBryan Stevenson15:16

      of innocent people in jails and prisons, but that will never happen to me, because I've got the resources, or I'm in a status where that's less likely. And because of that, it's just not a big problem." And that valuation of, uh, suffering makes us indifferent to things I think we should not be indifferent to. It makes us non-responsive in the ways that I think we should be non-responsive. We've documented that for every eight people executed in this country, uh, we've identified one innocent person on death row. It's a shocking rate.

   2. AGAdam Grant15:48

      One in eight?

   3. BSBryan Stevenson15:49

      One in eight. And-

   4. AGAdam Grant15:51

      No.

   5. BSBryan Stevenson15:51

      It's astonishing, but yes, for every eight people we've executed, we've identified one innocent person on death row. And we would not tolerate that kind of error for aircraft. If every... If one out of eight planes crashed and everyone would die, we would stop flying, as much as we need to fly. If someone told you that there's a toxin on one out of eight apples in the grocery store, that if you touch it, will kill you, we would stop selling apples. This data is not really in dispute, but we continue executing people in this country, because again, we have this way of just not seeing the harm of that. So part of my work is trying to create people, uh, create a consciousness about the fact that when our system, uh, executes an innocent person or convicts an innocent person, that's a reflection on all of us. It's not just a burden for that person. It means that we can't claim the greatness that many of us want to claim.

   6. AGAdam Grant16:45

      Initially, I thought your explanation was illuminating.

   7. BSBryan Stevenson16:48

      Yeah.

   8. AGAdam Grant16:48

      And it landed at just complete moral outrage.

   9. BSBryan Stevenson16:51

      Yeah.

7. 16:51 – 19:13

   Reducing wrongful convictions: conviction integrity units, fairness oversight, and engaged voting

   1. AGAdam Grant16:51

      It's just unacceptable. How do we get to a point where we reduce that number ideally to zero? There... I mean, no, no innocent person should ever be executed. I, I, I would've thought that goes without saying in 2026. I know we can't, we can't drop it to zero overnight. You mentioned judge and prosecutor accountability as something that's missing. How might we create that?

   2. BSBryan Stevenson17:11

      Well, I do think that there are a lot of things we could do that we're not currently doing. Um, specifically with regard to innocence, there was a movement about 10 years ago, uh, where a lot of people were saying, "Look, instead of the burden being on the condemned, instead of it being on journalists who do these investigative cases, instead of it being on the Innocence Project and advoc- advocacy groups like mine, who have to do all of these extraordinary things to get the evidence to prove that someone is innocent-" Why shouldn't the burden be on the entity that is actually responsible for this conviction? And many prosecutors s- began to embrace this idea that they should create what are known as conviction integrity units, and these units would allow the state or the government to use its resources to reexamine a case if a claim was made that the person was wrongly convicted. And they don't need a judge to grant discovery. They don't need a court to open up files. They don't need permission. They can just go do what these other people have to do, uh, through litigation. And there were probably 20, 25, uh, DA offices, district attorney offices around the country that embraced this, and many of them, uh, created, uh, outcomes that resulted in the release of a lot of people who were wrongly convicted, wrongly condemned. But this was very much in reaction to the overwhelming evidence of so many people on death row who had been wrongly convicted. 200 people have now been proven innocent. And unfortunately, that trend has reversed, and now many of the prosecutors in these offices have retreated from that commitment to conviction integrity unit. And so we still don't have a consciousness in this country that says this is something we should all commit to. Uh, the federal government, uh, was encouraging this, and now of course

8. 19:13 – 22:48

   Finality over fairness: how procedural hurdles eclipse truth in capital cases

   1. BSBryan Stevenson19:13

      they've completely retreated from it. So that's one of the things that we could do to really bring down these numbers. The second is having oversight, uh, in these cases that focuses on fairness. Uh, I won't get deep into it, but if you're a lawyer representing someone on death row, 80% of the time the court never addresses the merits of the issue that you're raising. So if I'm complaining that the prosecutor excluded all of the Black people from serving on the jury, and that's u- unconstitutional, it violates the 14th Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, it's racial bias, 80% of the time that issue doesn't get addressed, and what the court focuses on instead is, well, did the lawyer object at the right time? Did the lawyer use the right words to preserve this issue? Was this issue raised in the initial appeal? Was it raised at the right time in state court? And these procedural challenges dominate the litigation. If you picked up a death penalty case and you read it, almost all of it's going to be about procedure, and very little of it's gonna actually be on questions of guilt or innocence or wrongfulness of the conviction or constitutionality. And so our courts have given in to this concept where we prioritize finality over fairness, and this has been adopted by the US Supreme Court. It's been adopted by state and federal courts. And I just think particularly in a death penalty case, if we just stripped away all of the proceduralism and we required courts to just make a judgment, is this person actually guilty for the crime for which they're going to be executed? Is this trial constitutional, uh, a- and, and reliable in the way that our courts and our Constitution requires? We would have a very different tolerance. We'd have a very different system. So many of the executions are surrounded by these profound questions of innocence. And then I think the last thing is that there, there needs to be accountability. I mean, you know, my clients, if they break into someone's house, I can't go to court and say, "Yes, my client broke into this house. They committed a burglary, but I've talked to them, and they said they're not gonna... They're gonna do better. They're gonna try not to do that again."

   2. AGAdam Grant21:26

      [laughs]

   3. BSBryan Stevenson21:26

      Nobody's gonna let them just go home. They're gonna say, "No, you committed a crime. You did something you shouldn't do. You have to be held accountable for that." And we haven't created that consciousness when it comes to these systems. Y- you know, um, I, I just think when you allow these kinds of wrongful convictions to shape and frame the way your system works, you have to be willing to say, "Okay, we've gotta stop. We can't do this anymore until we do the work that is needed to improve reliability." And that thinking just does not exist in the United States. We keep pushing and doing and all of these things, and if we could create that kind of consciousness, I think it would make a huge difference. So I do believe that people should become more active in voting in communities where prosecutors are elected, uh, where judges are elected. There's almost no intelligence about who these judges are, who these prosecutors are. But you should be asking, uh, what are your policies about conviction integrity unit, Mr. or Ms. District Attorney? Are you going to ensure that no one is convicted by your office who's innocent? Uh, Judge, how are you thinking about making sure that constitutional values are always upheld, not just when there's a procedural, uh, preservation of that? And I think that would change the way these policymakers and these officials with the most power operate.

9. 22:48 – 29:13

   Accountability gap: immunity for officials and the pushback against qualified immunity reform

   1. AGAdam Grant22:48

      You know, as, as you're talking, I find myself thinking about a more basic mechanism of judge accountability.

   2. BSBryan Stevenson22:54

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AGAdam Grant22:54

      Which is there are two kinds of errors you can commit as a judge, as I understand it. One is a false positive, the other is a false negative. And the foundation of our legal system, uh, I think everyone learns in school as a kid, is that it's better to c- you know, let hundreds or thousands of guilty people go free than it is to convict one innocent person, and the stakes of that just go up so much higher when we're talking about capital punishment. Let me just caveat this by saying I have not seen any empirical evidence that this is a good idea, but I would be very interested in, in experimenting with an incentive system whereby if a judge allows one innocent person to be condemned to death, they lose their spot on the bench. Uh, eh, that, that is w- that is an error that is too costly to allow to happen ever, and so why do we have any tolerance for it? Is, is there a movement along these lines?

   4. BSBryan Stevenson23:43

      Yeah.

   5. AGAdam Grant23:43

      Has anyone talked about actually looking at judge records and in the same way that, you know, a surgeon who, you know, who caused a, a whole series of medical errors would- lose their license?

   6. BSBryan Stevenson23:54

      Yeah, I think it's a really helpful insight, Adam, and I think that framing would dramatically improve the reliability, um, of our system, but not generally, no. Uh, the, the institutions, the politicians who have the power to implement something like that have largely been unwilling to intervene. Even our United States Supreme Court has kept giving immunity to police, to prosecutors, and judges even when they break the law. And so rather than incentivizing the kind of scrutiny and care that you're suggesting, we've almost done the opposite. We've immunized people, um, from any accountability, any liability because of their role as the judge and their role as the prosecutor or their role as a police officer, and that immunity law has done, I think, exactly the opposite of what you're proposing. There was a movement a few years ago of eliminating this qualified immunity that gets assigned particularly to law enforcement officers who knowingly conceal evidence or knowingly plant evidence to suggest that an innocent person is guilty, or knowingly do things that coerce people into saying things that aren't true. And, uh, unfortunately, the Supreme Court and most policymakers, uh, refuse to adopt that effort.

   7. AGAdam Grant25:21

      Wow.

   8. BSBryan Stevenson25:21

      And I think we are all suffering as a result of it. I, I agree with you. There's very little harm in increasing our commitment to minimizing the risk that innocent people are wrongly convicted or wrongly condemned. There's great, um, increase for everybody, 'cause when we improve the system for people who are facing the death penalty, we obviously improve the system for everybody. And it doesn't matter whether you're poor or you're wealthy, or you're, you're a Republican or a Democrat, if we have a more reliable system that is w- uh, very committed to fairness and procedures that, uh, allow the truth to, to dominate what happens, then we all benefit from that.

   9. AGAdam Grant26:02

      It almost sounds like our legal system is suffering in the same way that our political system is, which is we don't do performance reviews.

   10. BSBryan Stevenson26:08

       Yeah. [laughs]

   11. AGAdam Grant26:09

       These are, these are supposed to be professionals.

   12. BSBryan Stevenson26:11

       Uh, uh-

   13. AGAdam Grant26:11

       It is... If you make a catastrophic error that results in, you know, the, the, either the permanent incarceration or the killing of an innocent person, I, I think, I think it's pretty clear then that you have failed at your job.

   14. BSBryan Stevenson26:25

       Yeah.

   15. AGAdam Grant26:25

       And normally when somebody fails at their job, especially if they do it repeatedly, they don't get to keep doing it anymore.

   16. BSBryan Stevenson26:31

       Yeah.

   17. AGAdam Grant26:31

       And it's, it's just so... It's ironic that, you know, in, in a profession that takes, takes standards of integrity so seriously, um, there's so little when it comes to standards of accountability.

   18. BSBryan Stevenson26:42

       Yeah, I think you're right, and sadly, I think it's getting worse. There are people who run to be elected judge, or even at the Supreme Court, who are basically promoting an idea that they're not gonna worry about technicalities. They're not gonna worry about the niceties of guilt or innocence. They wanna lock people up. They wanna see more punishment. They wanna see more executions, and they don't really care so much about how they get there, and in a political environment like that, you're of course going to just increase all of those stressors that make wrongful convictions and wrongful, uh, death sentences such a problem. And many of the wrongful convictions that I see are, are a result of communities that are angry about some violent crime, um, on edge, demanding that there be an arrest, demanding that there be punishment, and that demand for arrest and punishment often means that people who are poor, people who are disfavored, people who are vulnerable become, uh, the kind of the sacrificial offerings, if you will. And if we don't have a legal system that insists on always getting it right, uh, never accepting, uh, errors in these very severe cases, then you're going to continue to see the problems that I've seen throughout my career. I mean, people ask me all the time about the death penalty, and I'm always prone to tell them that the death penalty isn't an issue you should think about by asking whether people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed. I think the threshold question is, do we deserve to kill when we have a system that is so compromised by unreliability? When we have a system that makes so many mistakes, when we've been so unwilling to create a- an infrastructure, a process that ensures fairness, that ensures consistency, that ensures that the, the most culpable are punished. In the absence of that, it's just almost, uh, an abstract question to ask about the morality of the death penalty because we have a structure that is incapable, in my judgment, of producing the kind of outcomes that a lot of people, uh, I think would insist on if it was someone that they cared about, someone that they loved.

   19. AGAdam Grant28:46

       Definitely, and y- reframing that moral debate as a practical one, w- whether you think that, you know, a, a government should have the right to kill or not, given how flawed and unreliable our legal system is, is that a wise thing to do, is I think maybe a, a more pragmatic way to have the discussion. Now, uh, this is another irony, but you're describing people who punish for a living and yet are not subjected to any punishment themselves for wrongdoing.

10. 29:13 – 31:40

    From lynching to modern wrongful convictions: fear-driven politics and the “Brady” problem

    1. BSBryan Stevenson29:13

       That's right. The whole system is structured in a very kind of peculiar way. The legal system is not seen as an everybody system, at least the criminal legal system. It's seen as something that only bad people get c- pulled into, or only certain kinds of people get pulled into. And so the oversight has just been much less rigorous, and there are, um, uh, extreme things that a judge can do that will cause a judge to be Um, uh, sanctioned or they lose their position. There are extreme things that a prosecutor or a lawyer can do, but by and large, there is not the attention to fairness, the attention to reliability, the attention to outcome in these critical cases that you would expect. For example, there's a set of case law, the Brady v. Maryland was the Supreme Court decision that basically held that if the prosecutor or the police withhold evidence that is exculpatory, that helps an accused, then that is a violation of the Constitution, and the person is entitled to a new trial if that's proved. The court has been moving away from enforcing that with the kind of rigor that many of us think it should be refo- uh, it, it enforced. And as a result, we just make it easier and easier for those who have the motivation to hide evidence, to lie about evidence, to not turn over things that make the case harder, to do that. And again, it's the opposite of the kind of accountability. Plus, you put the politics on. I mean, uh, you know, my work has, uh, focused on the history of, uh, terror violence and lynching in America, and one of the big questions that emerges when you look at 100 years where Black people were pulled out of their homes, beaten, tortured, drowned, and lynched on courthouse lawns, how did we as an organized society, a society committed to the rule of law, tolerate mobs going to courthouses and literally pulling people out of the jail and torturing them on the courthouse lawn? How did we think it was acceptable, uh, to take people and, uh, hang them on poles and mutilate their bodies and bring little kids to watch all of this torture in these sometimes carnival-like atmospheres? Well, it was again that attitude of fear and anger, that pol- political environment of, uh, tolerating things that would not otherwise be tolerated, accepting things that would not otherwise be accepted.

11. 31:40 – 36:12

    Moral disengagement and America’s narrative of racial difference: the deeper engine of injustice

    1. AGAdam Grant31:40

       Yeah. It's, it's so frustrating as you describe it because it makes me think about the great psychologist Albert Bandura, who built a, a theory of moral disengagement, where he wanted to understand why people perpetrated inhumanities. And his simple explanation was they perpetrate them against people they don't see as fully human, that when you dehu- when you dehumanize someone, you start to, to disconnect the harm you do f- to them from your sense of, you know, of morality. Uh, it's also been called ethical fading along with moral disengagement, that the, the... I think the fundamental psychology is the same. Um, if somebody is, is not human, it's not that different from swatting a fly.

    2. BSBryan Stevenson32:20

       I, I think it's so insightful. Uh, I mean, I've been doing now narrative work for the last 15 years because, uh, the courts were tolerating increasingly these constitutional violations that a decade earlier we would have won. And it became clear to me that we were retreating from that commitment to the rule of law that made it possible for me to go to high school and college and law school, and that's happened before in American history. After the Civil War, we created a 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection for formerly enslaved people. We created a 15th Amendment which guaranteed the right to vote, and then Reconstruction collapsed, and our Supreme Court retreated from enforcing these constitutional rights, uh, and instead prioritized states' rights. They wanted those people who were kind of preaching, uh, these narratives of racial difference to be prioritized. And I think you're right that we have to see that as a broader narrative struggle, that it r- it resides in this space where people are disengaging, uh, from this concept that all human beings are equal. And so much of my work recently has been about trying to challenge this narrative of racial difference that we've inherited, to challenge the narratives that feed that kind of moral disengagement that we have tolerated for too long. And so for me, that means talking about things that we haven't really talked a lot about in US history. I think we need to talk more about what happened to Indigenous peoples when Europeans came to this continent. You know, we had a Constitution that talked about equality and liberty and justice for all. Those concepts are very clear in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, but we didn't apply them to Indigenous peoples. We instead made up this narrative of racial difference. We said, "Oh, no, those native people, they're savages, and because they're a different kind of human being, our commitment doesn't apply to them." And then we felt comfortable dispossessing people of their land. We s- we felt comfortable subjecting people to famine and war and disease, and it's that same narrative of racial difference that gave rise to 246 years of slavery. And I think the great evil of slavery in America wasn't the violence, the brutality, the degradation, the forced labor. All of that was horrific, but I think the greatest evil of slavery in America was the narrative we created that allowed enslavers to do that moral disengagement, that allowed enslavers to feel that they were moral and decent and Christian Even while they enslaved other people. And it's hard to understand because, uh, when you see a mother being pulled away from her screaming children, knowing that that mother will never see those children again because you are selling her, because you are treating her as property, how do you think of yourself as moral and decent and a person of faith? Well, you need a narrative to help you reconcile that reality. And so we created a false narrative in America where we said that Black people aren't as good as white people, that Black people are less capable, less human, less evolved, less this, less that. And that narrative of racial difference is what gave rise to that ideology of racial caste, of racial hierarchy, and that's what undermined our commitment to the Constitution in the 1870s and '80s, our commitment to the 14th and 15th Amendments. It's what allowed states to create these constitutions where they codified white supremacy, where they passed Jim Crow laws. It's what created the conditions that put me in that colored school as a little boy in the community where I grew up. It continues to haunt us today. And if we're not going to respond to the suffering, the injustice, the abuse of people because of their race or their gender or their ethnicity or their nation of origin, we're going to continue to feed that moral disengagement that I think leads to so much injustice in the world.

12. 36:12 – 37:57

    Montgomery sites for truth-telling: Legacy Museum and Montgomery Square’s lessons in collective action

    1. AGAdam Grant36:12

       Bryan, you have built a series of monuments and a museum to justice. Ta- talk to me a little bit about Montgomery Square, and if you'd like to invite our listeners to visit.

    2. BSBryan Stevenson36:22

       Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yes, I would love for everyone to please come and visit us in Montgomery, Alabama. We've created four sites now that attempt to reckon with our history. Uh, the Legacy Museum is a comprehensive space that explores, uh, the horrors of slavery, but also the legacy of slavery, and a multimedia space with lots of content and first-person narratives. I think it's one of the most immersive spaces you can go in America to have a up-close experience with this history. And then our newest space, Montgomery Square, uh, we just opened, uh, this past, uh, month, and it's a deep dive into the Montgomery decade that changed the world, and we want to honor the 50,000 people in this city who refused to ride the buses for 382 days, and they gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. And of course, that movement tore down the architecture of Jim Crow and segregation, gave birth, uh, to the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Act of '65, which has fundamentally changed the legal, political, social, and cultural landscape of this country. And so we wanna celebrate that, but we also want people to understand all of the dynamics that went into that and not forget that if there's inequality, if there's injustice, if there's abuse of power, if there are things that are unfair, we have within us the capacity, uh, to stand up against that, to do things that can fundamentally change, uh, the way our nation works, the way the world works, and that's as much a part of the lesson of Montgomery Square as the history we present.

13. 37:57 – 42:29

    Lightning round to persuasion craft: staying persuadable and speaking to where people are

    1. AGAdam Grant37:57

       Wow. Okay, I wanna go to a lightning round now.

    2. BSBryan Stevenson37:59

       Okay.

    3. AGAdam Grant37:59

       Are you ready?

    4. BSBryan Stevenson38:00

       Yes.

    5. AGAdam Grant38:01

       What is the worst career advice you ever got?

    6. BSBryan Stevenson38:03

       You can pursue a career in music or pursue a career in sports, but it's too unreliable for that to be a rational decision.

    7. AGAdam Grant38:12

       What, what is the best advice you've gotten in your life?

    8. BSBryan Stevenson38:16

       If you have the option to get a job that you're passionate about, where you get to do things you care about, where you can wake up every day and feel good about what you do, that's a job you should absolutely embrace.

    9. AGAdam Grant38:28

       You get to organize a dinner party. Anyone in human history to help us fix what's broken in our legal system today, who are you inviting?

    10. BSBryan Stevenson38:36

        Wow. I'll invite W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thurgood Marshall, Ida B. Wells, and William Brennan, US Supreme Court Justice.

    11. AGAdam Grant38:48

        Wow. That's quite a crew.

    12. BSBryan Stevenson38:49

        [laughs]

    13. AGAdam Grant38:50

        Okay. I think it's safe to say that anybody who's sat in a room when you get on stage regards you as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, speakers they've ever seen. And part of that is because the content of your message is so compelling, but part of it is also the delivery. I, I just think you're, you're a master orator, and I wonder, [laughs] what is your best tip about how to make an argument and how to give a great speech?

    14. BSBryan Stevenson39:13

        Well, thank you. That's very kind. To me, you have to meet people where they are. Uh, when I'm in a courtroom, where are people situated in their ability to do justice for my client or to hear what I think is important for them to hear? And I can't put the burden on them to come to me. I have to go to them. And for me, speaking is about creating a framework, uh, to reach people where they are, to try to go where people are, to be as aware as I can be about the obstacles that keep them from doing what I think they need to do, and then creating narrative structures that allow people to see the importance.

    15. AGAdam Grant39:51

        You know, as we've been talking, I noticed there's a, a particular habit that you have that I think makes you more persuasive. You often begin a sentence by saying, "I am persuaded that," which is very different from saying, "I believe," or, "It is undeniable that." I'm curious to hear, is that deliberate? As a psychologist, it strikes me that as soon as you open with, "I am persuaded that," you are signaling your own openness. Is that intentional?

    16. BSBryan Stevenson40:15

        It is. I, I, I don't want anybody to think that I came into the world with all the knowledge and all the insights, and I want to give myself room to evolve and to grow and to think. I, I've, I've learned a lot over the course of my career. I see things today that I didn't see 20, 30 years ago. It is, I think, human nature to grow, to expand, to have a deeper and broader awareness of a lot of things. And I think if we have a conversation and just signal that at the very outset that that is the nature of all of our struggles and journeys, it becomes easier for people to put down those, uh, hardcore beliefs that sometimes keep them from seeing something that is really important for them to see. And, uh, I want to model what I hope people will give me, uh, when we're engaged in discourse, when we're engaged in dialogue.

    17. AGAdam Grant41:12

        I think every time you say, "I am persuaded," you remind us that you're persuadable, and we are too. And it's different from saying, "I am convinced," which is full of the kind of dogmatism and single-minded conviction that scares me. "I am persuaded" suggests that I could still change my mind. I love that.

    18. BSBryan Stevenson41:33

        Well, thank you. I think it's particularly useful now for all of us to be more open to being [laughs] persuaded about things that have, uh, shaped our behavior, shaped our thinking, shaped our decision-making. I think, again, growing up in, in, in a region where segregation had shaped life for so long, people were absolutely convinced that the world would end if there was racial integration in the schools. The world would end if we stopped enforcing these rigid social conventions. And what we've learned is that the world didn't end and, and, and that the world actually got better when we opened ourselves up to the beauty of human creation. And we've seen manifestations of that in so many spaces over the last 50 years, that it's actually exciting to think about how else we can expand our mind and what else we can persuade ourselves that, that will help us create a more just and vibrant world.

14. 42:29 – 44:10

    Justice needs mercy: why accountability without compassion becomes injustice

    1. AGAdam Grant42:29

       Bryan, when you, when you talk about justice, I think for some people there's a tension between justice and mercy. And so when you, when you wrote Just Mercy-

    2. BSBryan Stevenson42:38

       [laughs]

    3. AGAdam Grant42:38

       ... or, you know, when, when people have seen you on the big screen, I think they look at that and say, "But sometimes we have to let go of mercy if we want justice and vice versa. And in particular, some crimes are just unforgivable. Some people should be defined by the worst thing they've ever done, serial killers, for example." What would you say to those people?

    4. BSBryan Stevenson42:57

       Yeah, I don't think you can get to justice without mercy. I, I think if you make a judgment that is completely devoid of mercy, you're gonna end up doing things that are extreme. You're gonna end up doing things that are unjust. There's nothing about justice that disqualifies some role of mercy. That doesn't mean that you don't hold people accountable. That doesn't mean that you don't, uh, punish people. It doesn't mean that you don't incarcerate people. All of that can be, um, legitimate in the context of what someone has done. But I think it's not necessary, and I think not healthy, to pull mercy out of the equation. I don't wanna live in a world without mercy. I don't wanna get, live in a world where anyone is reduced to the worst thing they've done, because that's a world where forgiveness and grace and mercy can't reside, and I don't think that's gonna be a, a, a happy or peaceful or just world for any of us.

    5. AGAdam Grant43:53

       Wow. That's the opposite of moral disengagement. That is moral elevation.

    6. BSBryan Stevenson43:56

       [laughs] Well, thank you.

    7. AGAdam Grant43:58

       Well, Bryan, this is, this is such a gift.

    8. BSBryan Stevenson44:00

       Thank you, Adam. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 44:20