Thousands Released as Result of Bipartisan First Step Act; Interview with Author Bryan Stevenson on Criminal Justice System
ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree on anything these days. But one thing they can and did agree on is criminal justice reform. One year ago today, President Trump signed the First Step Act, with bipartisan support. As a result more than 3,000 inmates were released from prison. Critics were quick to point out it only addressed prison reform, not sentencing reform. Just six months later, the Justice Department announced it would resume capital punishment after two decades. A new movie called, "Just Mercy," tells the true story of Walter McMillan, played by Jamie Foxx. McMillan was wrongly convicted of murder and served six years on death row. He was exonerated with the help of a young lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, played by Michael Lee Jordan. The movie is distributed my Warner Brothers, a sister company of CNN, and will be in theaters starting on Christmas Day. Here's a preview.</s>UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: They convicted an innocent man. I was always taught to fight for the people who need it the most.</s>UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: You don't know what it is down there. They ain't got to have no evidence.</s>UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: How many of you all were with Walter that morning?</s>UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: You ain't quitting this?</s>UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: No, sir. We all with you.</s>CABRERA: I have to say I had a chance to see it. It is a powerful movie. I sat down with Bryan Stevenson, who's book, "Just Mercy: A True Story of the Fight for Justice," inspired the movie. He is also an executive producer of the film.</s>CABRERA: You take people to death row and give us some insight into part of the judicial system most people don't want to think about. Why tell this story now?</s>BRYAN STEVENSON, AUTHOR: I continue to worry about what's happened in this country. We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We went from a prison popular of about 200,000 in 1972 to 2.2 million today. We have six million people on probation and parole in this country. There's 70 million Americans with criminal arrest histories. When they try to get jobs or loans they're disfavored by that arrest history. We have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. That's not right or fair. The death penalty is ground zero of a lot of the excess that has characterized how we've managed criminal justice over the last half century. For every nine people we've executed in this country, we've now identified one innocent person who's been exonerated.</s>CABRERA: The work you've been doing at the Equal Justice Initiative in the past 30 years, you have been able to get the release, relief or reversal of more than 140 people wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced to death. That is incredible when you think about those numbers and the amount of work each case takes.</s>STEVENSON: Yes.</s>CABRERA: What struck me about the movie and the one story you focus in on, Walter McMillan. As somebody learning his story, as the facts are revealed, it's so obvious that he was wrongly convicted.</s>STEVENSON: Yes.</s>CABRERA: And yet, even as those facts are put out there, the truth almost didn't set him free.</s>STEVENSON: That's right.</s>CABRERA: How do you explain that?</s>STEVENSON: I think we have allowed ourselves to be governed by fear and anger. And when you have people pushing these narratives of fear and anger, people will begin to tolerate things they shouldn't, accept things they shouldn't. I think that fear and anger are the essential ingredients of injustice and oppression. In the '70s and '80s, we said addicted people were criminals. We will use the criminal justice system to respond to that population. We could have said that people with addiction and dependency issues have a health care need and need our health care system to respond. But revved up by that fear and anger and demonizing, it became impossible to talk strategically. Everybody wanted to be tough on crime, put people in prison and lock them up forever. In that sort of environment, innocent people will be wrongly convicted.</s>CABRERA: Is there any evidence that the death penalty serves as a crime deterrent?</s>STEVENSON: No, no. In fact, we tend to see increases in violent crime in some of the places that are most actively implementing the death penalty. I think for a lot of people, if the state can kill, if the government can kill, it doesn't help advance the point that no one should kill. There's a kind of illogic to the death penalty in my view. We say we're going to teach people that killing is wrong by killing someone. Most people who are in crisis, the mentally ill, people who are in the margins of society, aren't going to be deterred by the threat of violence or death.</s>CABRERA: So do you think there's any circumstance in which the death penalty is warranted?</s>STEVENSON: No. For me, the death penalty is about, do we deserve to kill. I think if you focus the question on, does someone deserve to die, you can come up with those scenarios. But if you turn the question to, do we deserve to kill -- we don't have a perfect system. And the death penalty requires a perfect system. If you make a mistake, you don't have the ability to recover from that.</s>CABRERA: As you know, the Supreme Court just halted --</s>STEVENSON: Yes. Yes.</s>CABRERA: -- the Trump administration's effort to resume executions in federal death penalty cases after a 16-year hiatus.</s>STEVENSON: Yes, yes.</s>CABRERA: What's your reaction?</s>STEVENSON: I think that's the right response. Whenever you try to use the death penalty for a political goal, you're going to do things that are unjust.</s>CABRERA: How do you square the Trump administration's advocacy of the death penalty with the criminal justice reform like the First Step Act that passed last year or the pardoning or commuting of sentences of people like Alice Marie Johnson?</s>STEVENSON: I think it's progress where you've gotten to the point that you have people in both parties that recognize that reform is needed. It doesn't mean that people don't also say things that are echoes of this whole era of fear and anger. But it's really important to remember that leadership on these issues is not going to come from Washington. You know, our criminal justice system is a state-based system. And 90 percent of the people in our jails and prisons are there based on state convictions. Less than 10 percent of the prison population in this country is there as a result of a federal conviction. So the president and even the Congress, no matter what kind of reforms they implement, will only have a small impact on what's happening nationwide.</s>CABRERA: Your work has taken on a new direction or another layer, I should say, as you continue to explore the history of racial inequality and economic injustice with your legacy museum, from enslavement to mass incarceration in Alabama. What do you hope that accomplishes?</s>STEVENSON: I hope we can create an era of truth and justice in this country. We are still burdened by the legacy of slavery. The worst thing that happened during that period wasn't the involuntary servitude. We can end that. The worst thing was this myth we created that black people aren't as good as white people, that black people aren't fully human, that black people are dangerous. And that created this ideology of white supremacy, this racial hierarchy. That's why people are pulled out of their homes. You can be a talented, gifted, athlete, you can be an educator, you can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, but you still have to navigate these presumptions of dangerousness. That's why I believed it was time to get out of the court and start talking about these larger issues. I have just seen what's happened in other parts of the world where there's been the willingness to talk. Rwandans insists on telling you about the genocide. I go to Berlin --</s>CABRERA: Right.</s>STEVENSON: With the Holocaust, you see the symbols and stones everywhere that mark the places where Jewish families were abducted. Germans want you to go to the Holocaust memorial. There are no Adolf Hitler statutes in Germany. They don't want to be thought of like Nazis. In this country, we haven't talked about slavery. We haven't marked the places where lynchings took place. We haven't talked about this legacy. I think that has to change. That was the motivation for creating the legacy museum at the national memorial, which is dedicated to thousands of victims of lynching.</s>CABRERA: My thanks for that conversation and Bryan Stevenson. Coming up, see what happens when rescue workers try to pull a child from the rubble in Syria after an airstrike.