At TED2012, lawyer Bryan Stevenson made an impassioned case for
confronting racial and economic injustice in the American
justice system. And, he argued, confronting that means changing
the way the system approaches child offenders. In his talk he
says: “I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young.
The United States is the only country in the world where we
sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. We have life
imprisonment without parole for kids in this country … the only
country in the world.” Stevenson is Executive Director of the
Equal Justice Initiative, who represented two plaintiffs in a
case before the United States Supreme Court. In Miller v.
Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, two young men were sentenced to
life without the possibility of parole, sentences that were
mandated by law. Stevenson argued that laws mandating sentences
of life without the possibility of parole for adolescents and
children are unconstitutional. Yesterday, the Court ruled those
mandatory sentences unconstituti