Join us for an evening with Stephen Bright, one of the loudest and most persuasive voices on the problems of racism and classism in our criminal justice system for over 40 years. He has tried capital cases before juries in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, and argued cases before state and federal appellate courts, including four capital cases before the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court reversed three cases because of racial discrimination in jury selection and the fourth because of the denial of funds for a crucial expert witness.

“An urgently needed analysis of our collective failure to confront and overcome racial bias and bigotry, the abuse of power, and the multiple ways in which the death penalty’s profound unfairness requires its abolition. You will discover Steve Bright’s passion, brilliance, dedication, and tenacity when you read these pages.” —from the foreword by Bryan Stevenson

Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they did not have a case against him.

Ford’s trial was a travesty. One of his court-appointed lawyers specialized in oil and gas law and had never tried a case. The other had been out of law school for only two years. They had no funds for investigation or experts. The prosecution struck all the Black prospective jurors to get the all-white jury that sentenced Ford to death.

In The Fear of Too Much Justice, legendary death penalty lawyer Stephen B. Bright and legal scholar James Kwak offer a heart-wrenching overview of how the criminal legal system fails to live up to the values of equality and justice. The book ranges from poor people squeezed for cash by private probation companies because of trivial violations to people executed in violation of the Constitution despite overwhelming evidence of intellectual disability or mental illness. They also show examples from around the country of places that are making progress toward justice.

With a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, who worked for Bright at the Southern Center for Human Rights and credits him for “[breaking] down the issues with the death penalty simply but persuasively,” The Fear of Too Much Justice offers a timely, trenchant, firsthand critique of our criminal courts and points the way toward a more just future.

Stephen B. Bright is a Harvey L. Karp Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. He served as director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta from 1982 to 2005, and as its president and senior counsel from 2006 to 2016. Before joining the Southern Center, he was a legal services attorney in Appalachia; a public defender in Washington, D.C.; and director of a law school clinical program in Washington. He is also Visiting Associate Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Subjects of his litigation, teaching and writing include capital punishment, legal representation for poor people accused of crimes, conditions and practices in prisons and jails, racial discrimination in the criminal courts, and judicial independence. He is the author with former student and Yale Law graduate James Kwak of The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts (The New Press, 2023).

Bright received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998. The Daily Report, a legal newspaper in Georgia, named him “Agitator (and Newsmaker) of the Year” in 2003 for his contribution to bringing about creation of a public defender system in Georgia, and Lawyer of the Year in 2017 for his success in challenging racial discrimination before the United States Supreme Court in the case of Foster v. Chatman. His work is the subject of Robert L. Tsai’s, Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All (Norton, March 2024); William S. McFeely’s, Proximity to Death (Norton, 1999), and Katya Lezin’s, Finding Life on Death Row (Northeastern, 1999), and a film, Fighting for Life in the Death Belt (EM Productions, 2005).

Co-hosts

Amnesty International USA

Atlantic Center for Capital Representation

NAACP York Branch

Witness to Innocence