Rare Breed - profiles of three defense lawyers who work death penalty cases, Stephen Bright, Bryan Stevenson, and John Holderidge

"Johnny D," already incarcerated on death row for 15 months, was a little leery of lawyers. His previous team of two attorneys had spent "no time on the case" and as far as Johnny D. was concerned "weren't worth $5."

Stevenson, 28 at the time, had just been appointed executive director of the fledgling Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center. Johnny D. was his third death row interview at Holman prison that January afternoon. Upon seeing the inmate, Stevenson launched into his "standard speech," Earley wrote. It was one he gave to all his clients, some of whom were too afraid to confess the heinous nature of their crime, even to their lawyers.

"It doesn't matter to me whether a person has killed 900,000 people or if a person has never killed anyone. The objective is still the same. I don't want to see you executed. The bottom line is, your life is of value regardless of what you have done."

"He was just like a brother," Johnny D said of his devoted attorney who, along with co-counsel Michael O'Connor, obtained exoneration for his client in 1993. On the day of Johnny D's release, Stevenson was waiting to take him home.

"They didn't need to bring the car for me that day," McMillian mused. "I could've just run out of there and on down the road. I felt like I wanted to fly."

In 1996 the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center lost its federal funds and was replaced by Equal Justice Initiative, a private, nonprofit organization. Its staff of five attorneys, two fellows and four legal assistants are currently involved in 100 death penalty cases, "which is way more than a staff of our size should do," said Stevenson.

Capital trials are notoriously long and complicated -- stretching out for years and requiring hundreds of hours of legal work. According to The New York Times, a Florida firm reported that it spent 10 years and $10 million worth of lawyering hours representing one death row client.

Like their Atlanta counterparts, the initiative's attorneys, three of whom graduated from Harvard Law School and one from Yale, work for meager wages -- somewhere under $30,000. They have had "uncommon success," according to Stevenson. "Seventy death sentences were overturned through our litigation."

In May, the initiative obtained a stay of execution for mentally retarded death row inmate Gary Holloday, pending a review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Stevenson hopes the case will lead to a change in Alabama legislation. Twenty-one states have expressly exempted the mentally retarded from execution. Alabama is not among them.

But for the Alabama attorney, these successes "are not enough, given how many people are at risk." His work as a death penalty lawyer is not what he imagined for himself.

Many death sentences reversed

A study of U.S. death penalty convictions between 1973 and 1995 found that two-thirds of the verdicts reviewed were reversed:

68% were
reversed

 Direct appeal,
 state level        41%

 Federal review     21%

 Post-conviction,
 state level         6%

32%
were not
reversed

[C] 2000 KRT SOURCE: "A Broken System: Error Rates
in Capital Cases 1973-95" a study of 4,578 convictions

Note: Table made from pie chart.
What happened
in reversed cases:

75%   Sentence
      reduced

18%   Retried and
      sentenced to
      death again

 7%   Found
      innocent