Bryan Stevenson will be sharing some hard truths about America's justice system to an audience in Irvine later this afternoon.
And, no, befitting an Orange County crowd, the famed human rights lawyer will not argue we need to incarcerate more young black men and other people of color.
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Prison Blues – Visiting time at Wasco State
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This TED talk posted in March reveals what Stevenson is all about:
Working in everyone from his
grandmother to Rosa Parks, Stevenson uses frank language to expose this country's unexamined history. It will surely come up again when he delivers the annual Al Meyerhoff Public Interest Lecture at UC Irvine School of Law from 4:30-5:30 p.m. today. A reception follows the free address titled, “Confronting Mass Incarceration and Excessive Punishment in America.”
The late Meyerhoff was a renowned labor, environmental and civil rights lawyer who brought a landmark case to stop sweatshop conditions for 30,000 workers on the Pacific island of Saipan. The yearly event in his name is meant to honor his tireless public service.
He'd find a like mind in Stevenson, a New York University law professor and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged, poor people denied effective representation and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct.
Reservations are recommended at Law.UCI.edu to guarantee a seat in EDU 1111.
Follow this link for directions.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.