Bryan Stevenson, Aaron Family Professor of Criminal Justice, has been named the recipient of both the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, which will be presented this month and the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, to be presented in June 2025. The two awards come in recognition of Stevenson’s decades-long advocacy on behalf of the poor and the incarcerated as the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law organization.
Conferred annually by the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and named for the late New York senator, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize recognizes civic leaders, public officials, and social scientists whose work is for public good. Past winners have included former chair of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, former US Ambassador to the United States Samantha Powell, and former president of the Children's Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman. During the awards ceremony on November 18, Stevenson will deliver the Moynihan Lecture on Social Science and Public Policy in Washington, DC.
The mission of the Stockholm Prize, which was established under the patronage and supervision of Sweden's Ministry's of Justice, is to advance the public's understanding of the root causes of crime and to promote humane solutions for dealing with criminal offenders. The international jury cited Stevenson's work as lead attorney on Miller v. Alabama—the landmark 2012 US Supreme Court case that found that mandatory sentences of life without parole for children aged 17 and under were unconstitutional—as well as the advocacy by EJI that has saved from execution more than 130 incarcerated people on death row. Stevenson will share the prize with UK prison reform advocate Frances Crook.
Over the course of his career, Stevenson's work has been honored with a multitude of awards, including a National Humanities Medal, the Award for Courageous Advocacy from the American College of Trial lawyers, the Lawyer for the People Award from the National Lawyers Guild, and the MacArthur Fellowship Award, among many others. EJI, which Stevenson founded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1989 and continues to lead, focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the United States. Additionally, EJI litigates on behalf of juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged, poor people denied effective representation and others whose trials have been marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct. Also in Montgomery, Stevenson led EJI's establishment of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first national monument dedicated to the more than 4,000 Black people who were lynched in racial terror attacks from across the US.
Stevenson has written extensively on criminal justice, capital punishment and civil rights issues and has publishers several widely used manuals on capital litigation. He is also the author of a bestselling memoir about his work, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which won the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Best Non-Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the NAACP Image Award for Best Non-Fiction.
Posted November 1, 2024