Dartmouth Events

Lecture Description:

The criminal courts are the institutions least affected by the Civil Rights Movement.  Throughout history, from slavery, to convict leasing, to lynchings, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration, the criminal courts have played a primary role in the oppression of people of color. Race is a dominant factor in everything from police stops to the many discretionary decisions made in the court system to the exclusion of racial minorities from positions in the system. Poor people accused of crimes are often denied lawyers or assigned incompetent lawyers who leave them defenseless in cases where the lives, liberty or property is at stake.

Speaker Bio:

Stephen B. Bright has represented poor people in the legal system for more than 40 years, as a legal services attorney, public defender, and an attorney with a public interest law project, and taught at law schools for more than 20 years. Subjects of his litigation, teaching, and writing include legal representation for poor people accused of crimes, capital punishment, human rights violations in prisons and jails, and judicial independence. He has argued capital cases before juries in three states, in state and federal appellate courts, and in three cases before the United States Supreme Court.  He joined the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta as its director in 1982 and served in that capacity for 23 years before becoming its president and senior counsel in 2006, the positions he holds today. Bright has taught at Yale Law School since 1993, and at a number of other law schools, including Harvard, Georgetown, Emory and Georgia. The Daily Report, Georgia’s legal newspaper, named him “Newsmaker of the Year” in 2003 for his contribution to bringing about creation of a public defender system in Georgia.  He received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998.