Bryan Stevenson

Biography

Bryan Stevenson was born in 1959 in rural Milton, Delaware, to a working-class family descended from enslaved people. His grandfather was murdered in Philadelphia when Stevenson was sixteen. He attended Eastern University on a scholarship and Harvard Law School, where he encountered death-row work through a semester program. He moved to Alabama in 1989, founded EJI in Montgomery, and has represented more than 135 people facing execution. He has argued before the Supreme Court multiple times. He remains EJI's executive director and a professor at NYU School of Law. He has never been married — the work is the life.

Bryan Stevenson at a glance