The antidote to injustice with Bryan Stevenson

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2:02And everybody in my family was outraged. But my grandmother, this remarkable human being who was raised by people who were enslaved, who always felt an obligation to be merciful, asked, I am mad that we allowed children to be in our city, to be in the world, who didn't know any better than to do something like this, who didn't function in a way that made them understand how this should never, ever happen. And while she wanted people to be held accountable, she wanted more to create an environment where children don't kill 86-year-old people because they want some property. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant.

2:44Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

3:00Brian Stevenson is a public interest lawyer and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. He's argued and won multiple cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, including rulings that protect juvenile offenders from mandatory life imprisonment and death sentences. What I've been trying to do throughout my career is just to establish these basic rights for all human beings, which means then that maybe my clients won't be executed. Maybe the children I represent won't be condemned to die in prison. Maybe the people who are innocent and wrongly convicted will have an opportunity to have the evidence of their innocence reviewed.

3:39and maybe we can do more for the poor. Maybe we can do more for those who are food insecure. Maybe we can do more for those who are struggling with mental illness. Brian and his staff have won reversals relief or relief from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row. They're also working to expand access to legal education across the South. And Brian's best-selling memoir, Just Mercy, is adapted into a hit movie in 2019. Brian got the longest standing ovation in TED history and it's not hard to see why. Along with being a brilliant thinker and speaker, he might be the most important moral voice of our time.

4:13It was a privilege to talk with him about how we can build a better legal system and a better society, and how we can win the cases that really matter in our own lives.

4:28Well, I have a lot that I'm excited to talk about today. I think for me, the opening that I've never gotten to ask you is, How did you become passionate about, first of all, law, and second of all, rescuing people from death row? I think even before I appreciated the structure of society or any of those big things, I realized that lawyers and law can make a huge difference. Growing up in a community that was racially segregated, where Black people were isolated and marginalized, The schools were segregated. Churches were segregated. Parks were segregated. The beach was segregated. I was surrounded by adults who didn't have high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hardworking, but there were literally no high schools for black people in our county when my dad was a teenager.

5:18And then these lawyers came into our community. I started my education in a colored school. But the lawyers came in and made them open up the public schools. And even though the county was 80 % white and 20 % black, and even if you had to vote, we would have lost the vote on whether black kids could go to the public schools. These lawyers had the ability to make them open up the public schools. And as a result of that, I got to go to high school. I went to college. I went to law school. I mean, honestly, I was a first-generation college student. I was majoring in philosophy. And during my senior year, somebody came up to me and said, Brian, I hope you know that nobody's going to pay you to philosophize when you graduate from college.

6:01And it created this panic moment. Little did they know. Little did they know. But I started looking into graduate programs. I kept looking. And honestly, that's how I found my way to law school. I knew that there was power in the law to push for change, to create new structures, new systems, new realities for people. And I didn't formally understand it when I was in the second grade and the public schools opened up. But I began to appreciate that beyond politics, beyond other forms of power, the rule of law can actually require people to do things that they don't really want to do, that they would otherwise not do.

6:43And of course, I went there with a burden for the poor, for the excluded, the marginalized, people like the people I grew up with. And graduating and beginning to represent people who were disfavored and condemned, it just became clear to me that the only way we're going to really help the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable people in our society, the people who are disfavored, the people who are marginalized, was to kind of create a framework of rights. And that really does relate back to that childhood experience of seeing lawyers literally open up schoolhouses that had been closed for 100 years to people in my community.

7:21It's amazing. Well, I've admired your work for a long time. And I think probably the first time that I read you, you just right out of the gate changed my mind about what the opposite of poverty is. Talk to me about that. Yeah, I think working with the poor, working with people who are excluded, it just became clear to me that wealth wasn't the answer. So many of the people that I represent who are poor and excluded are poor and excluded because they've been treated unfairly. They've been treated unjustly. We've created systems that don't work well for people coming out of some of these spaces.

8:01And so that's what really led me to just kind of reflect on this idea that the opposite of poverty isn't wealth. I think sometimes we talk too much about money in America. I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is justice. And when we do justice, when we create conditions that help create opportunities without barriers, when we create systems that treat people fairly without regard to their race or their gender or their ethnicity, when we actually allow access to the things that everybody wants access to to thrive, we create a world that is more just. And I think we then reduce the amount of poverty, reduce the amount of scarcity, reduce the amount of suffering in so doing.

8:44And so rather than just all of us thinking we just need more wealth, I think there's a place that we have to create where we think we need more justice, where doing justice becomes an even greater priority than just promoting wealth. Doing justice becomes a bigger priority than creating systems of supply here and meeting a demand there. Brian, you've, I think, referenced in times when people are losing hope for progress. You've referenced Martin Luther King and the observation that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It seems to a lot of people like the arc is bending away from justice right now.

9:24What do you say to that and how do you maintain hope? Well, I don't think I believe that the arc is bending away from justice. I certainly think we're in a difficult period, but it's never been a straight line. You know, my great-grandparents were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia. And despite the fact that it was against the law for enslaved people to learn to read or write, my great-grandfather had a hope of freedom that was so great, he risked his life to learn how to read or write. In the 1850s, as a teenager, he didn't know that a civil war was coming in the next decade. And I think that hope is the anecdote to these shifts, but four million people were emancipated after the Civil War.

10:09They thought everything was going to be great. Well, it wasn't. There was kind of this collapse of reconstruction. There was lynching. There was sharecropping and tenant farming. Convict leasing meant that people were effectively put back in bondage, and it could have seen then that the moral arc is not moving, but through determination, through continued commitment to building churches and schools and families, we got to the point where that was no longer tolerated. I live in Montgomery, Alabama. It's a community that has been dominated by decades of racial segregation. George Wallace said in 1963, segregation forever, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

10:50But people had a hope that we could get past that. And now we've been able to tear down that legal architecture of Jim Crow and segregation. And so I think there is a forward progress. That doesn't mean that there won't be counter narratives along the way. When abolitionists tried to end slavery, enslavers said, oh, no, we're going to make it illegal for anybody to possess abolitionist literature. So they would put white people in prison for having abolitionist literature in slave states. They would punish or even execute enslaved people. There was a counter-narrative. There was a struggle. There was a civil war, and it didn't always look like the Union forces would prevail.

11:31During the time of lynching, Ida B. Wells and many others were pushing back against that horrid institution, but it continued for many decades. It was a narrative struggle. During the civil rights era, it wasn't that everybody just said, okay, Dr. King, you're right. We need to open up our hearts and minds. We need to embrace your dream. They were intensely oppositional to it. They killed people to maintain segregation. They beat people to maintain segregation. I mean, living where I live, I walk these streets and am mindful of the fact that the generation before me would put on their Sunday best.

12:05They'd go places to push for the right to vote, push for the right to be treated equally. They'd be on their knees praying and they'd get battered and bloodied and beaten. And yet they had enough hope to go back home and wipe the blood off and change their clothes and do it again. The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice when people embrace the hope that is needed for the struggle for justice to continue. And that's why I am still persuaded that we are moving toward that. And I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice. And so if I care about justice, I cannot afford to become hopeless in this context.

12:45Our hope is our superpower. It is the thing that causes many of us to stand when people say sit down, to speak when people say be quiet. I am the product of generations of hopeful people. I wouldn't be here if they hadn't had enough hope, including my enslaved great-grandparents, to learn to read and to pass that knowledge along. So I just think that That has to be the way we face the moment that we are in. And when we do that, and when more of us do that, it becomes easier for everyone. The pathway becomes a little straighter. You know, the valleys are a little less overwhelming. The mountains are a little less intimidating.

13:26And we're just in a moment right now where we have to gather the forces needed to feel that movement toward progress, movement toward justice. I have so many questions for you about how to create the world that you envision, because it sometimes seems like we're a long way off. And I think probably nowhere is that clearer than the work that you do on death row. It's just, as an outsider, it's unfathomable to me that somebody who is innocent could be condemned to death. It just seems completely barbaric. Can you help me make sense of why that still happens at all? Well, I think it's an important question, and I'm glad you pose it, Adam, because I think we haven't asked that question enough of our policymakers, of our elected officials, of the people who manage our legal system.

14:19They're never questioned about how fair it is, how reliable it is. In the absence of any questioning means that they don't think much about creating a more reliable system. I think it happens for three reasons. Number one, we have throughout our history given in to what I call the politics of fear and anger from time to time. And we don't have to agree on policy issues. We don't have to agree on a lot of things. But there are narratives that feed bigotry, that feed violence, that feed hatred, that feed inequality and injustice. And I believe when people allow themselves to be governed by fear and anger, they start tolerating things they should never tolerate.

14:59They start accepting things they should never accept. And so in too many of our places, we accept that we have a legal system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. We accept that we have a legal system that makes enormous number of errors. And it's in part because we're allowing fear and anger about crime to shape our decisions. And that has certainly happened here in the United States. until the 1970s, we had a relatively stable prison population in this country. Then in the 70s, you had politicians from both political parties arguing that people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminals who should be punished for their addiction and drug dependency.

15:42Even though if we had recognized that addiction and drug dependency is a health problem and responded using a health analysis, we could have spared ourselves a lot of cost, a lot of suffering, a lot of disruption to communities and lives, but we allowed that fear and anger frame to set things. And so similarly, we got into this spiral where we were competing with one another at the political level on who could be the toughest, who could be the most extreme in their sentencing. And so these narratives have given rise to an environment where reliability, fairness, and even innocence is not the priority when it comes to how we treat people.

16:28Another part of that narrative is just the way we debate and make these decisions. I am persuaded that we appreciate and believe in proximity in most areas of life. So when it comes to innovation, technologists know that they have to understand things intimately to be able to do something better, to enhance things. Business people know that to be good investors, you have to understand everything that impacts supply and demand. And we have this built-in commitment to proximity in so many areas in medicine and science and journalism. But with regard to justice, too many people think that they can shape what is a just system when they're not close to the people who are experiencing injustice, when they're not close to the people who are going to be directly impacted.

17:15And that allows the debates and the policy discussions to get, I think, hijacked by these false notions. And so, for example, in the policy area, when somebody says, well, this crime of, you know, burglary or this crime of child pornography, this crime of drug trafficking, I hate those crimes. So I want to give that 40 years and 60 years and 80 years. And they talk as if they can put crimes in prison. But the truth, of course, is that we cannot put a crime in prison. We can only put a person in prison. And people are not crimes. They can commit crimes and we can hold them accountable for the crimes they've committed.

17:55But if we don't hold in our head the difference between a person and a crime, we'll create punishments that are cruel. We'll create punishments that are extreme. will create punishments that are flawed by our preoccupation with extreme punishment, even if that comes at the risk of convicting people who are innocent. That narrative challenge is, I think, the first part of how we get this. The second part has to do with just the very politicized nature of our legal system and the way in which the people who have the most responsibility for making sure that we only put people who are guilty in jails and prisons are the people who are the least accountable when we actually make mistakes.

18:36And so we don't hold judges accountable for the mistakes they make when innocent people are convicted. We don't hold prosecutors accountable. We don't really hold police accountable. It becomes the burden of the condemned, of the person who's been convicted to prove their innocence. And then when they are exonerated, half the states of this country don't acknowledge that by even giving them compensation for that wrongful error. So we've made it far too easy, in my judgment, to convict people who are innocent, to imprison people who shouldn't be in prison, to punish people unfairly, and then done very little to respond to that, even when the evidence is pretty dramatic.

19:15The third thing is that because of our history of racial inequality, of disfavoring the poor, we just don't value the suffering of all people equally. And that problem of valuing the suffering of some people less than the suffering of other people just makes us indifferent to the problems of unreliable prosecution, erroneous prosecution. Most people think, well, yeah, we probably do have some innocent people on death row. Or yeah, we probably do have a lot of innocent people in jails and prisons, but that will never happen to me because I've got the resources or I'm in a status where that's less likely.

19:56And because of that, it's just not a big problem. And that valuation of suffering makes us indifferent to things I think we should not be indifferent to. It makes us non-responsive in the ways that I think we should be non-responsive. We've documented that for every eight people executed in this country, we've identified one in this in person on death row. It's a shocking rate. One in eight? One in eight. And it's astonishing, but yes, for every eight people we've executed, we've identified one instant person on death row. And we would not tolerate that kind of error for aircraft. If one out of eight planes crashed and everyone would die, we would stop flying as much as we need to fly.

20:40If someone told you that there's a toxin on one out of eight apples in the grocery store that if you touch it, we'll kill you, we would stop selling apples. This data is not really in dispute, but we continue executing people in this country because, again, we have this way of just not seeing the harm of that. So part of my work is trying to create people, create a consciousness about the fact that when our system executes an innocent person or convicts an innocent person, that's a reflection on all of us. It's not just a burden for that person. It means that we can't claim the greatness that many of us want to claim.

21:16Well, I mean, you started, initially, I thought your explanation was illuminating, and it landed at just complete moral outrage. Yeah. It's just unacceptable. How do we get to a point where we reduce that number, ideally to zero? I mean, no innocent person should ever be executed. I would have thought that goes without saying in 2026. I know we can't drop it to zero overnight. You mentioned judge and prosecutor accountability as something that's missing. How might we create that? Well, I do think that there are a lot of things we could do that we're not currently doing. Specifically with regard to innocence, there was a movement about 10 years ago where a lot of people were saying, look, instead of the burden being on the condemned, instead of it being on journalists who do these investigative cases, instead of it being on the innocence project in advocacy groups like mine who have to do all of these extraordinary things to get the evidence to prove that someone is innocent, why shouldn't the burden be on the entity that is actually responsible for this conviction?

22:24And many prosecutors began to embrace this idea that they should create what are known as conviction integrity units. And these units would allow the state or the government to use its resources to re-examine a case if a claim was made that the person was wrongly convicted. And they don't need a judge to grant discovery. They don't need a court to open up files. They don't need permission. They can just go do what these other people have to do through litigation. And there were probably 20, 25 DA offices, district attorney offices around the country that embraced this, and many of them created outcomes that resulted in the release of a lot of people who were wrongly convicted, wrongly condemned.

23:15But this was very much in reaction to the overwhelming evidence of so many people on death row who had been wrongly convicted. 200 people have now been proven innocent. And unfortunately, that trend has reversed, And now many of the prosecutors in these offices have retreated from that commitment to conviction integrity unit. And so we still don't have a consciousness in this country that says this is something we should all commit to. The federal government was encouraging this, and now, of course, they've completely retreated from it. So that's one of the things that we could do to really bring down these numbers.

23:56The second is having oversight in these cases that focuses on fairness. I won't get deep into it, but if you're a lawyer representing someone on death row, 80 % of the time the court never addresses the merits of the issue that you're raising. So if I'm complaining that the prosecutor excluded all of the Black people from serving on the jury, and that's unconstitutional. It violates the 14th Amendment and the 6th Amendment. It's racial bias. Eighty percent of the time, that issue doesn't get addressed. And what the court focuses on instead is, well, did the lawyer object at the right time? Did the lawyer use the right words to preserve this issue?

24:41Was this issue raised in the initial appeal? Was it raised at the right time in state court? And these procedural challenges dominate the litigation. If you picked up a death penalty case and you read it, almost all of it's going to be about procedure. And very little of it's going to actually be on questions of guilt or innocence or wrongfulness of the conviction or constitutionality. And so our courts have given into this concept where we prioritize finality over fairness. And this has been adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court. It's been adopted by state and federal courts. And I just think particularly in a death penalty case, if we just stripped away all of the proceduralism and we required courts to just make a judgment, is this person actually guilty for the crime for which they're going to be executed?

25:31Is this trial constitutional? and reliable in the way that our courts and our Constitution requires, we would have a very different tolerance. We'd have a very different system. So many of the executions are surrounded by these profound questions of innocence. And then I think the last thing is that there needs to be accountability. I mean, you know, my clients, if they break into someone's house, I can't go to court and say, yes, my client broke into this house. They committed a burglary, but I've talked to them and they said, they're going to do better. They're going to try not to do that again.

26:03Nobody's going to let them just go home. They're going to say, no, you committed a crime. You did something you shouldn't do. You have to be held accountable for that. And we haven't created that consciousness when it comes to these systems. You know, I just think when you allow these kinds of wrongful convictions to shape and frame the way your system works, you have to be willing to say, okay, we've got to stop. We can't do this anymore until we do the work that is needed to improve reliability. And that thinking just does not exist in the United States. We keep pushing and doing and all of these things.

26:38And if we could create that kind of consciousness, I think it would make a huge difference. So I do believe that people should become more active in voting, in communities where prosecutors are elected, where judges are elected. There's almost no intelligence about who these judges are, who these prosecutors are. But you should be asking, what are your policies about conviction integrity unit, Mr. or Ms. District Attorney? Are you going to ensure that no one is convicted by your office who's innocent? Judge, how are you thinking about making sure that constitutional values are always upheld, not just when there's a procedural preservation of that?

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30:15You know, as you're talking, I find myself thinking about a more basic mechanism of judge accountability, which is there are two kinds of errors you can commit as a judge, as I understand it. One is a false positive, the other is a false negative. And the foundation of our legal system, I think everyone learns in school as a kid, is that it's better to let hundreds or thousands of guilty people go free than it is to convict one innocent person. And the stakes of that just go up so much higher when we're talking about capital punishment. So let me just caveat this by saying, I have not seen any empirical evidence that this is a good idea, but I would be very interested in experimenting with an incentive system whereby if a judge allows one innocent person to be condemned to death, they lose their spot on the bench.

31:05That is an error that is too costly to allow to happen ever. And so why do we have any tolerance for it? Is there a movement along these lines? Has anyone talked about actually looking at judge records and in the same way that, you know, a surgeon who, you know, who caused a whole series of medical errors would lose their license? Yeah, I think it's a really helpful insight, Adam. And I think that framing would dramatically improve the reliability of our system, but not generally know the institutions, the politicians who have the power to implement something like that have largely been unwilling to intervene.

31:43Even our United States Supreme Court has kept giving immunity to police, to prosecutors, and judges, even when they break the law. And so rather than incentivizing the kind of scrutiny and care that you're suggesting, we've almost done the opposite. We've immunized people from any accountability, any liability, because of their role as the judge and their role as the prosecutor or their role as a police officer. And that immunity law has done, I think, exactly the opposite of what you're proposing. There was a movement a few years ago of eliminating this qualified immunity that gets assigned particularly to law enforcement officers who knowingly conceal evidence or knowingly plant evidence to suggest that an innocent person is guilty or knowingly do things that coerce people into saying things that aren't true.

32:41And unfortunately, the Supreme Court and most policymakers refuse to adopt that effort. And I think we are all suffering as a result of it. I agree with you. There's very little harm in increasing our commitment to minimizing the risk that innocent people are wrongly convicted or wrongly condemned. There's great increase for everybody because when we improve the system for people who are facing the death penalty, we obviously improve the system for everybody. And it doesn't matter whether you're poor or you're wealthy or you're a Republican or a Democrat. If we have a more reliable system that is very committed to fairness and procedures that allow the truth to dominate what happens, then we all benefit from that.

33:28It almost sounds like our legal system is suffering in the same way that our political system is, which is we don't do performance reviews. These are supposed to be professionals. If you make a catastrophic error that results in either the permanent incarceration or the killing of an innocent person, I think it's pretty clear then that you have failed at your job. And normally when somebody fails at their job, especially if they do it repeatedly, they don't get to keep doing it anymore. And it's ironic that in a profession that takes standards of integrity so seriously, there's so little when it comes to standards of accountability.

34:09Yeah, I think you're right. And sadly, I think it's getting worse. There are people who run to be elected judge or even at the Supreme Court who are basically promoting an idea that they're not going to worry about technicalities. They're not going to worry about the niceties of guilt or innocence. They want to lock people up. They want to see more punishment. They want to see more executions. And they don't really care so much about how they get there. And in a political environment like that, you're, of course, going to just increase all of those stressors that make wrongful convictions and wrongful death sentences such a problem.

34:46And many of the wrongful convictions that I see are a result of communities that are angry about some violent crime on edge, demanding that there be an arrest, demanding that there be punishment. And that demand for arrest and punishment often means that people who are poor, people who are disfavored, people who are vulnerable become the kind of the sacrificial offerings, if you will. And if we don't have a legal system that insists on always getting it right, never accepting errors in these very severe cases, then you're going to continue to see the problems that I've seen throughout my career.

35:21I mean, people ask me all the time about the death penalty, and I'm always prone to tell them that the death penalty isn't an issue you should think about by asking whether people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed. I think the threshold question is, do we deserve to kill when we have a system that is so compromised by unreliability? When we have a system that makes so many mistakes, when we've been so unwilling to create an infrastructure, a process that ensures fairness, that ensures consistency, that ensures that the most culpable are punished. In the absence of that, it's just almost an abstract question to ask about the morality of the death penalty because we have a structure that is incapable, in my judgment, of producing the kind of outcomes that a lot of people, I think, would insist on if it was someone that they cared about, someone that they loved.

36:13Definitely. And reframing that moral debate as a practical one, whether you think that a government should have the right to kill or not, given how flawed and unreliable our legal system is, is that a wise thing to do? Is, I think, maybe a more pragmatic way to have the discussion. Now, this is another irony, but you're describing people who punish for a living and yet are not subjected to any punishment themselves. for wrongdoing. That's right. The whole system is structured in a very kind of peculiar way. The legal system is not seen as an everybody's system, at least the criminal legal system.

36:54It's seen as something that only bad people get pulled into or only certain kinds of people get pulled into. And so the oversight has just been much less rigorous. And there are extreme things that a judge can do that will cause a judge to be sanctioned or they lose their position. They're extreme things that a prosecutor or a lawyer can do. But by and large, there is not the attention to fairness, the attention to reliability, the attention to outcome in these critical cases that you would expect. For example, there's a set of case law, the Brady versus Maryland was the Supreme Court decision that basically held that if the prosecutor or the police withhold evidence that is exculpatory, that helps an accused, then that is a violation of the Constitution and the person is entitled to a new trial if that's approved.

37:50The court has been moving away from enforcing that with the kind of rigor that many of us think it should be enforced. And as a result, we just make it easier and easier for those who have the motivation to hide evidence, to lie about evidence, to not turn over things that make the case harder to do that. And again, it's the opposite of the kind of accountability. Yeah. It's so frustrating as you describe it, because it makes me think about the great psychologist, Albert Bandura, who built a theory of moral disengagement, where he wanted to understand why people perpetrate inhumanities. And his simple explanation was they perpetrate them against people they don't see as fully human.

38:34That when you dehumanize someone, you start to disconnect the harm you do to them from your sense of morality. It's also been called ethical fading along with moral disengagement. I think the fundamental psychology is the same. If somebody is not human, it's not that different from swatting a fly. I think it's so insightful. I mean, I've been doing now narrative work for the last 15 years because the courts were tolerating increasingly these constitutional violations that a decade earlier we would have won. And it became clear to me that we were retreating from that commitment to the rule of law that made it possible for me to go to high school and college and law school.

39:18And that's happened before in American history. After the Civil War, we created a 14th Amendment guaranteeing nuclear protection for formerly enslaved people. We created the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote. And then Reconstruction collapsed, and our Supreme Court retreated from enforcing these constitutional rights and instead prioritized states' rights. They wanted those people who were kind of preaching these narratives of racial difference to be prioritized. And I think you're right that we to see that as a broader narrative struggle, that it resides in this space where people are disengaging from this concept that all human beings are equal.

40:01And so much of my work recently has been about trying to challenge this narrative of racial difference that we've inherited, to challenge the narratives that feed that kind of moral disengagement that we have tolerated for too long. And so for me, that means talking about things that we haven't really talked a lot about in U.S. history. I think we need to talk more about what happened to indigenous peoples when Europeans came to this continent. You know, we had a constitution that talked about equality and liberty and justice for all. Those concepts are very clear in the Declaration of Independence in the U.S.

40:36Constitution. But we didn't apply them to indigenous peoples. We instead made up this narrative of racial difference. We said, oh no, those native people, they're savages. And because they're a different kind of human being, our commitment doesn't apply to them. And then we felt comfortable dispossessing people of their land. We felt comfortable subjecting people to famine and war and disease. And it's that same narrative of racial difference that gave rise to 246 years of slavery. And I think the great evil of slavery in America wasn't the violence, the brutality, the degradation, the forced labor, all of that was horrific.

41:14But I think the greatest evil of slavery in America was the narrative we created that allowed enslavers to do that moral disengagement, that allowed enslavers to feel that they were moral and decent and Christian, even while they enslaved other people. And it's hard to understand because when you see a mother being pulled away from her screaming children, knowing that mother will never see those children again because you are selling her, because you are treating her as property, how do you think of yourself as moral and decent and a person of faith? I mean, you know, my work has focused on the history of terror violence and lynching in America.

41:55And one of the big questions that emerges when you look at a hundred years where Black people were pulled out of their homes, beaten, tortured, drowned, and lynched on courthouse lawns, how did we as an organized society, a society committed to the rule of law, tolerate mobs going to courthouses and literally pulling people out of the jail and torturing them on the courthouse lawn. How did we think it was acceptable to take people and hang them on poles and, you know, mutilate their bodies and bring little kids to watch all of this torture and these sometimes carnival-like atmospheres? Well, you need a narrative to help you reconcile that reality.

42:38And so we created a false narrative in America where we said that black people aren't as good as white people. Black people are less capable, less human, less evolved, less this, less that. And that narrative of racial difference is what gave rise to that ideology of racial caste, of racial hierarchy. And that's what undermined our commitment to the Constitution in the 1870s and 80s. our commitment to the 14th and 15th Amendments. It's what allowed states to create these constitutions where they codified white supremacy, where they passed Jim Crow laws. It's what created the conditions that put me in that colored school as a little boy in the community where I grew up.

43:17It continues to haunt us today. And if we're not going to respond to the suffering, the injustice, the abuse of people because of their race or their gender or their ethnicity or their nation of origin, we're going to continue to feed that moral disengagement that I think leads to so much injustice in the world. This episode is sponsored by the Amazon Kindle Scribe. Up until now, people have had to choose between the focus that comes from writing on paper and the efficiency of laptops and tablets, which might come at the cost of distracting pop-ups and notifications. The Kindle Scribe's exciting new AI features are designed to streamline your workflow for maximum efficiency, but what's not on it is just as important.

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46:10Brian, you have built a series of monuments and a museum to justice. Talk to me a little bit about Montgomery Square, and if you'd like to, invite our listeners to visit. Yeah, well, thank you for that. Yes, I would love for everyone to please come and visit us in Montgomery, Alabama. We've created four sites now that attempt to reckon with our history. The Legacy Museum is a comprehensive space that explores the horrors of slavery, but also the legacy of slavery, in a multimedia space with lots of content and first-person narratives. I think it's one of the most immersive spaces you can go in America to have up-close experience with this history.

46:54And then our newest space, Montgomery Square, we just opened this past month, and it's a deep dive into the Montgomery decade that changed the world. And we want to honor the 50 ,000 people in this city who refused to ride the buses for 382 days, and they gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. And of course, that movement tore down the architecture of Jim Crow and segregation, gave birth to the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 65, which has fundamentally changed the legal, political, social, and cultural landscape of this country. And so we want to celebrate that, but we also want people to understand all of the dynamics that went into that and not forget that if there's inequality, if there's injustice, if there's abuse of power, if there are things that are unfair, we have within us the capacity to stand up against that, to do things that can fundamentally change the way our nation works, the way the world works.

47:51And that's as much a part of the lesson of Montgomery Square as the history we present. Wow. Okay, I want to go to a lightning round now. Okay. Are you ready? Yes. What is the worst career advice you ever got? You can pursue a career in music or pursue a career in sports, but it's too unreliable for that to be a rational decision. What is the best advice you've gotten in your life? If you have the option to get a job that you're passionate about, where you get to do things you care about, where you can wake up every day and feel good about what you do, that's a job you should absolutely embrace.

48:30You get to organize a dinner party. anyone in human history to help us fix what's broken in our legal system today. Who are you inviting? Wow. I'll invite W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thurgood Marshall, Ida B. Wells, and William Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Wow. That's quite a crew. Okay. Okay. I think it's safe to say that anybody who sat in a room when you get on stage regards you as one of the greatest, if not the greatest speakers they've ever seen. And part of that is because the content of your message is so compelling, but part of it is also the delivery. I just think you're a master orator.

49:21And I wonder what is your best tip about how to make an argument and how to give a great speech? Well, thank you. That's very kind. To me, you have to meet people where they are. When I'm in a courtroom, where are people situated in their ability to do justice for my client or to hear what I think is important for them to hear? and I can't put the burden on them to come to me. I have to go to them. And for me, speaking is about creating a framework to reach people where they are, to try to go where people are, to be as aware as I can be about the obstacles that keep them from doing what I think they need to do.

50:04And then creating narrative structures that allow people to see the importance. You know, as we've been talking, I noticed there's a particular habit that you have that I think makes you more persuasive. You often begin a sentence by saying, I am persuaded that, which is very different from saying, I believe, or it is undeniable that. I'm curious to hear, is that deliberate? But as a psychologist, it strikes me that as soon as you open with, I am persuaded that, you are signaling your own openness. Is that intentional? It is. I don't want anybody to think that I came into the world with all the knowledge and all the insights, and I want to give myself room to evolve and to grow and to think.

50:51I've learned a lot over the course of my career. I see things today that I didn't see 20, 30 years ago. It is, I think, human nature to grow, to expand, to have a deeper and broader awareness of a lot of things. And I think if we have a conversation and just signal that at the very outset, that is the nature of all of our struggles and journeys, it becomes easier for people to put down those hardcore beliefs that sometimes keep them from seeing something that is really important for them to see. And I want to model what I hope people will give me when we're engaged in discourse, when we're engaged in dialogue.

51:35I think every time you say, I am persuaded, you remind us that you're persuadable and we are too. And it's different from saying, I am convinced, which is full of the kind of dogmatism and single-minded conviction that scares me. I am persuaded suggests that I could still change my mind. I love that. Well, thank you. I think it's particularly useful now for all of us to be more open to being persuaded about things that have shaped our behavior, shaped our thinking, shaped our decision making. I mean, I think, again, growing up in a region where segregation had shaped life for so long, people were absolutely convinced that the world would end if there was racial integration in the schools.

52:26The world would end if we stopped enforcing these rigid social conventions. And what we've learned is that the world didn't end and that the world actually got better when we opened ourselves up to the breadth in diversity and the beauty of human creation. And we've seen manifestations of that in so many spaces over the last 50 years that it's actually exciting to think about how else we can expand our mind and what else we can persuade ourselves that will help us create a more just and vibrant world. Brian, when you talk about justice, I think for some people, there's a tension between justice and mercy.

53:05And so when you wrote just mercy, or when people have seen you on the big screen, I think they look at that and say, but sometimes we have to let go of mercy if we want justice and vice versa. And in particular, some crimes are just unforgivable. Some people should be defined by the worst thing they've ever done. Serial killers, for example. What would you say to those people? Yeah, I don't think you can get to justice without mercy. I think if you make a judgment that is completely devoid of mercy, you're going to end up doing things that are extreme. You're going to end up doing things that are unjust.

53:42There's nothing about justice that disqualifies some role of mercy. That doesn't mean that you don't hold people accountable. That doesn't mean that you don't punish people. It doesn't mean that you don't incarcerate people. All of that can be legitimate in the context of what someone has done. But I think it's not necessary and I think not healthy to pull mercy out of the equation. I don't want to live in a world without mercy. I don't want to live in a world where anyone is reduced to the worst thing they've done because that's a world where forgiveness and grace and mercy can't reside. And I don't think that's going to be a happy or peaceful or just world for any of us.

54:24Wow. That's the opposite of moral disengagement. That is moral elevation. Well, thank you. Well, Brian, this is such a gift. Thank you, Adam.

54:54Roxanne Hilash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

55:08Ugh, I got chills.

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