‘True Justice’ explores idealistic lawyer

Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson is always looking over details on death penalty cases.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. >> Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson rarely slows down, friends and family say. It seems he’s always looking over details on death penalty cases from his Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. If he’s not speaking on the criminalization of black men, Stevenson is researching another historical site connected to an episode of racial violence.

But a new HBO documentary on Stevenson attempts to get him to sit, speak and explain why he believes the legacy of lynchings of African Americans in the U.S. is directly linked to those who have wrongly been put on death row. In his mind, racial structures of oppression have remained in the U.S. judicial system since the Jim Crow-era and the death penalty is merely their direct descendant.

“Most people don’t know about our history of lynching,” Stevenson told The Associated Press in a phone interview shortly after receiving news Friday that the Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence for Curtis Flowers , a Mississippi black man. “People have never been required to talk about it. But when you sit and think about it, the correlation is there.”

Stevenson said the white lynch mob transformed into a formal judicial process in which often white prosecutors, white judges and largely white juries are tasked with deciding if a poor, black male accused of a crime is sentenced to death.

“True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality,” set to air Wednesday on HBO, shows how the Harvard-trained attorney is now dedicating his life to forcing the U.S. to face the violence experienced by its communities of color.

The Delaware-born Stevenson gained national attention in 1993 after he helped exonerate Walter McMillian, a 46-year-old black pulpwood worker on death row. McMillian