Formation 1994 Type Non-profit Executive director Bryan Stevenson | Founder Bryan Stevenson Location Montgomery, Alabama | |
Purpose Providing legal representation to those who may have been denied a fair trial. | ||
The Equal Justice Initiative (or EJI) is a non-profit organization, based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, poor prisoners without effective representation, and others who may have been denied a fair trial. It guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama in a death penalty case.
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History
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) was founded in 1994 in Montgomery, Alabama, by attorney Bryan Stevenson, who has served as the organization's executive director ever since. He had been working on Alabama defense cases since 1989 for the Southern Center for Human Rights and was director of its center for Alabama operations. It had received federal funding to provide legal representation to prisoners on death row. Congress ceased funding these centers in 1994, after Republicans gained control in a mid-term election. Alabama is the only state that does not provide legal assistance to death row prisoners; EJI has committed to representing them.
Stevenson converted his operation in Montgomery by founding a non-profit, the Equal Justice Initiative. In 1995 he was awarded a MacArthur grant, and he applied all of it to support the EJI. The EJI "guarantees legal representation to every inmate on the state’s death row." It has worked to eliminate excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerate innocent death row prisoners, confront abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aid children prosecuted as adults.
By 2013 EJI had a staff of 40, including attorneys and support personnel.
Campaign against life-without-parole sentencing for children
Following the Roper v. Simmons (2005) ruling, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to sentence to death a person who had been a child under 18 at the time of the crime, Stevenson began to work to have similar thinking applied to the sentencing of a convicted child to life without parole in prison. He has argued several cases in the Supreme Court, and has been part of a movement to urge changes in extreme sentencing of children convicted of crimes.
The Court has made several significant rulings to lighten sentencing of children since Roper v. Simmons. In 2006 EJI started a litigation campaign to challenge the sentencing of children to life-without-parole. Stevenson testified before the court in 2009 in one case. In Graham v. Florida (2010), the Court ruled that "mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger in non-homicide cases are unconstitutional." Since 2010, EJI has provided legal representation to nearly 100 people in the United States who are entitled to new sentences under Graham.
At that time, there were nearly "3000 children age 17 or younger who had been sentenced to imprisonment until death through life-without-parole sentences imposed with very little scrutiny or review. Children as young as 13 were among the thousands condemned to die in prison."
Most of the sentences imposed on these children were mandatory, but EJI continued to argue along the lines of the Court's ruling in Roper v. Simmons, that children have "unique immaturity, impulsiveness, vulnerability, and capacity for redemption and rehabilitation."
EJI argued in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs that the mandatory sentences constituted "cruel and unusual punishment" and were therefore unconstitutional. The Court ruled in these cases in June 2012 that even when cases involved homicide, mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children 17 or younger are unconstitutional. The ruling affected statutes in 29 states.
In Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), the Court ruled that the decision in Miller v. Alabama had to be applied retroactively, and required those sentencing to consider “children’s diminished culpability, and heightened capacity for change.” An estimated 2300 prisoners nationwide may be affected whose sentences will be reviewed.
In April 2015, EJI won the release on different grounds of Anthony Ray Hinton, a black man who had been on death row in Alabama for nearly 30 years; he had continued to maintain his innocence. He was released after being wrongfully convicted of murder due to inadequate counsel and faulty evidence. He had finally gained a new trial on appeal, as the defense found flaws in the main evidence used by the prosecution. In preparation for trial, the prosecution found that the bullets used in the crime did not match the gun they had traced to Hinton's home. There was no case, and the state dropped the charges.
As of August 2016, the EJI organization has saved 125 men from the death penalty.
Studies
The EJI has published a number of studies, revealing data to support reform in the criminal justice system. Several are listed below:
In February 2015, the organization released a report based on 5 years of research; it had concluded that a total of 3,959 lynchings had occurred in the twelve states of the South from 1877 to 1950. The victims were mostly black men. The Arkansas Race Riot was included. The report classified the lynchings as racial terrorism and discussed the long-term effects of the decades of violence on the African-American community and southern society, and on relations between the races. This new research added nearly 700 cases to previous documentation of lynchings in this period. The last major review of cases was published in 1995. Prior to that Tuskegee University and the NAACP had compiled continuing records of lynchings reported in the press. Researchers have sometimes differed in how they classify events.