Bryan Stevenson Speaks at SAU

Members of New Student Seminar classes this year at St. Ambrose University are likely to remember Bryan Stevenson long after they have earned their degrees.

An acclaimed and seasoned advocate for justice, Stevenson is author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The memoir details his lifelong mission to achieve justice for wrongly convicted men, women and children lost within a U.S. justice system that leads the world in incarcerations.

St. Ambrose is among a dozen colleges and universities that have selected Just Mercy as a first-year student reading project for the 2015-2016 academic year. Named one of 10 best non-fiction books of 2014 by Time magazine, the memoir resonates particularly well this year on the SAU campus, where Justice is the theme for the College of Arts and Sciences annual academic project.

Stevenson personally amplified the lessons available in Just Mercy on Oct. 20, when he served as the keynote speaker for the annual Ambrose Women for Social Justice Conference. His 7 p.m. lecture at the Galvin Fine Arts Center was titled American Injustice: Mercy, Humanity, and Making a Difference.

A 2012 TED Talk by the Delaware-born, Harvard-educated Stevenson was named as one of five essential TED lectures by The New Yorker magazine. A video of the talk has received more than 2.6 million views.

Sherri Erkel, PhD, director of the First and Second Year Experience program at St. Ambrose, said the university's First Book Committee reviewed dozens of books tied to the project theme of justice. The group ultimately identified Just Mercy as the book that best 'exemplified not only the themes of justice but also the liberal arts approach to complex social issues,' Erkel said.

Stevenson is an attorney and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. Under his direction, the organization has won reversals, relief, or release for more than 115 condemned U.S. prisoners. Stevenson was the attorney of record for dozens of those death-penalty reversals and has argued numerous cases before the United States Supreme Court. In 2012, he won a hallmark decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children under 17 are unconstitutional.

"Just Mercy intertwines several stories, each of which highlights a different angle to the issue of capital punishment for students to discuss," Erkel said. "It also was the top choice because Stevenson tells his own story of how he came to find his purpose and life's work."

That's a message that has been received by Amber Smith, a student in Katie Strzepek's Women and Gender Studies 201 class, which is part of the "Be the Change" New Student Seminar learning community. Smith said issues of racism and injustice described in the book provide context for the conflicts that recently have occurred in places like Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland, and Baltimore.

"The book really does make me think about my own life and how I treat others, and how I can change the way the world views others," she said.

Stevenson's story also has had a clear impact on Madison Grundler, another student in Strzepek's NSS learning community. "I absolutely love the book," she said, "but it makes me so mad. Something I don't like will come up, and I will rant about it for hours on end. It's an amazing read, though. It's very moving."

Their NSS classmate Hannah Penn vowed she will be moved to action. "This book shows us to be an advocate for justice no matter what the circumstances may be," she said. "People when innocent are many times wrongly accused because of their race and gender, and it is our job to end this."