News Intro Text
[The New Yorker, August 22, 2016]
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News Item Content
<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/">By Jeffery Toobin, The New Yorker </a></p>
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<p><span>In 1989, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American civil-rights lawyer named Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and founded an organization that became the Equal Justice Initiative. It guarantees legal representation to every inmate on the state’s death row. Over the decades, it has handled hundreds of capital cases, and has spared a hundred and twenty-five offenders from execution. In recent years, Stevenson has also argued the appeals of prisoners around the country who were convicted of various crimes as juveniles and given long sentences or life in prison. One was Joe Sullivan, who was thirteen when he was charged in a sexual battery in Pensacola, Florida. Sullivan’s original trial, in 1989, established that he and two older boys had burglarized the home of a woman named Lena Bruner on a morning when no one was there. That afternoon, Bruner was sexually assaulted in the home by someone whose face she never saw. The older boys implicated Sullivan, and he was convicted. They served brief sentences. Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole.</span></p>
<p><font color="#121212" face="Adobe Caslon, Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/bryan-stevenson-and-the-legacy-of-lynching">MORE</a>>></span></font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><span>In 1989, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American civil-rights lawyer named Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and founded an organization that became the Equal Justice Initiative. It guarantees legal representation to every inmate on the state’s death row. Over the decades, it has handled hundreds of capital cases, and has spared a hundred and twenty-five offenders from execution. In recent years, Stevenson has also argued the appeals of prisoners around the country who were convicted of various crimes as juveniles and given long sentences or life in prison. One was Joe Sullivan, who was thirteen when he was charged in a sexual battery in Pensacola, Florida. Sullivan’s original trial, in 1989, established that he and two older boys had burglarized the home of a woman named Lena Bruner on a morning when no one was there. That afternoon, Bruner was sexually assaulted in the home by someone whose face she never saw. The older boys implicated Sullivan, and he was convicted. They served brief sentences. Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole.</span></p>
<p><font color="#121212" face="Adobe Caslon, Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/bryan-stevenson-and-the-legacy-of-lynching">MORE</a>>></span></font></p>