No Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row

This chapter profiles Stevenson, the anti-death-penalty lawyer who represented Roy and Mark. In her preface, Kuklin describes auditing one of Stevenson’s classes at NYU Law School. She notes his calm, smiling demeanor, which betrayed no hint of the long night he spent preparing an oral argument to make before the Supreme Court. The case he would argue considered whether execution by lethal injection may, in some or all cases, violate the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Kuklin shifts to her interview with Stevenson, which comprises the rest of the chapter. Stevenson believes that “gratuitous” violence is very “troubling,” by which he means not only violent crimes but also capital punishment and the American penal system itself. To him, violence as a cure for violence is untenable and can only create a vicious circle. The only solution, he suggests, lies in prevention: looking at the roots of violent behavior, including poverty, despair, hopelessness, and racism. His religious upbringing gives him faith in the possibility of redemption—a belief that human beings, if valued and treated with dignity, can grow and change, whatever they might have done in the past.

Stevenson, who is African American, grew up in an impoverished, segregated region of rural Delaware. When he was 16, his grandfather was murdered in Philadelphia by two young men who broke into his home to steal his TV. Devastated, Stevenson found himself at a crossroads and eventually settled on a path that might allow him to address the roots of such violence. In college, he studied criminal justice as well as social issues such as race and poverty. As part of his coursework in his second year at Harvard Law School, he volunteered for a civil rights group (the Southern Prisons’ Defense Committee) in the Deep South that worked on capital punishment and prison issues. This was another life-changing experience; many of the defendants he worked with, he says, were so badly represented that they were “literally dying for legal assistance” (185). He notes that death row inmates are among the most “rejected” people in the world and that it is often their status as impoverished and Black, rather than their actual crimes, that put them on death row.

After graduating from law school, Stevenson began working for the Committee full-time, addressing prison issues such as beatings, suicide, epilepsy, medical malpractice, etc., much of it in Alabama prisons. Eventually, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama to handle death row cases involving indigent people, many of whom he believes are shockingly abused, neglected, and devalued by the system. If someone is murdered, he says, neither their race nor economic status nor those of the perpetrator should influence the sentencing; in America, however, it is all too often the deciding factor.

He says that there will always be those, notably prosecutors, who regard the legal service he provides to accused murderers to be odious—almost a crime in itself. However, Stevenson rejects the notion that the world is neatly divided into two groups: perpetrators of violent crimes and their victims. Most of the defendants he works with have been survivors of violence themselves, and many have suffered unimaginable losses: “My clients have seen siblings murdered, parents murdered, assaults, rapes. This becomes a way of life” (192). Violence begets violence, whether on the streets, in prison, or in the gas chamber. His fervent belief is that another approach is needed—one beginning with empathy and understanding.