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PEOPLE & ARTS Monday 1 July 2019

'True Justice' explores lawyer who defends death row inmates

By RUSSELL CONTRERAS "Most people don't know lence experienced by its
Associated Press about our history of lynch- communities of color.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) ing," Stevenson told The As- The Delaware-born Steven-
— Civil rights attorney Bry- sociated Press in a phone son gained national atten-
an Stevenson rarely slows interview shortly after re- tion in 1993 after he helped
down, friends and fam- ceiving news Friday that exonerate Walter McMil-
ily say. It seems he's always the Supreme Court had lian, a 46-year-old black
looking over details on overturned the death sen- pulpwood worker on death
death penalty cases from tence for Curtis Flowers , row. McMillian had been
his Montgomery, Alabama- a Mississippi black man. sentenced to death for the
based Equal Justice Initia- "People have never been 1986 fatal shooting of an
tive. If he's not speaking on required to talk about it. 18-year-old white woman
the criminalization of black But when you sit and think in an Alabama town where
men, Stevenson is research- about it, the correlation is Harper Lee wrote "To Kill a
ing another historical site there." Mockingbird." But Steven-
connected to an episode Stevenson said the white son was able to prove that
of racial violence. lynch mob transformed a key witness had lied and This undated image released by HBO shows civil rights attorney
Bryan Stevenson from the documentary“True Justice: Bryan Ste-
But a new HBO documen- into a formal judicial pro- prosecutors withheld im- venson’s Fight for Equality,” airing Wednesday on HBO.
tary on Stevenson attempts cess in which often white portant evidence. Associated Press
to get him to sit, speak and prosecutors, white judges The attorney then helped
explain why he believes the and largely white juries are exonerate Anthony Ray couldn't have been the period in 1919 when white
legacy of lynchings of Afri- tasked with deciding if a Hinton in 2015, an African one used in the shooting. mobs attacked and mur-
can Americans in the U.S. is poor, black male accused American man who spent In the documentary, Hinton dered African Americans
directly linked to those who of a crime is sentenced to 30 years on death row in talks about sitting on death in dozens of cities across
have wrongly been put death. Alabama after he was row and being forced to the U.S. Hundreds of Afri-
on death row. In his mind, "True Justice: Bryan Steven- convicted for the 1985 slay- smell the burning flesh of can Americans, some still in
racial structures of oppres- son's Fight for Equality," set ing of two fast-food man- other inmates in the electric their World War I uniforms,
sion have remained in the to air Wednesday on HBO, agers. Stevenson was able chair as a jail guard taunt- were lynched, tortured and
U.S. judicial system since shows how the Harvard- to show that experts could ed him. The film comes as forced from homes amid
the Jim Crow-era and the trained attorney is now prove Hinton's mother's the country prepares to heightened racial tensions
death penalty is merely dedicating his life to forc- gun, the one prosecutor mark the 100th anniver- and the rise of the revived
their direct descendant. ing the U.S. to face the vio- said was using in the killings, sary of "Red Summer" — a Ku Klux Klan.q