Equal Justice Initiative

EJI staff with honoree Diane Jones, second from left.

On March 23, 2010, EJI honored George Kendall, Director of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey's Public Service Initiative, and Thomas Sager, general counsel of the DuPont Company and DuPont's legal department, with its Equal Justice Award. The second annual award event celebrated the triumph of Diane Jones, the first woman in Alabama to be released from Tutwiler Prison after being sentenced to life in prison without parole.

On December 4, 2009, the Alabama Supreme Court reversed the case of Jason Sharp, who was sentenced to death following a trial tainted by the State's discrimination against African Americans during jury selection.

On August 11, 2009, North Carolina Governor Beverly Purdue signed into law the Racial Justice Act. The legislation recognizes the potential for racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and seeks to limit the influence of race-based discrimination in capital cases.

Kenneth Frazier (left) won the release of James "Bo" Cochran, who spent 19 years on Alabama's death row for a crime he did not commit.

EJI client Earl McGahee, who is African American, was tried by an all-white jury in a county where the African American population was over 55%. The prosecutor excluded all of the African Americans from jury service based on their race and what he characterized as their "low intelligence." After two decades spent challenging the race discrimination in this case, EJI won relief for Mr. McGahee yesterday when the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his capital murder conviction because the prosecutor engaged in illegal racial discrimination during jury selection.

On October 21, 2008, EJI attorneys argued that the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals should order a new trial for death row prisoner David Wilson because the Houston County prosecutor at his trial illegally eliminated every black potential juror.

Racially discriminatory practices by Alabama prosecutors, including the elimination of African American jurors because they appeared to be of “low intelligence,” were examined by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, Georgia, in oral argument on October 20, 2008. Bryan Stevenson argued on behalf of Earl McGahee, who was tried by an all-white jury in a majority-black county after the State excluded every African American from jury service.

EJI is challenging the ruling of a Houston County, Alabama, trial judge, which refused to shield death row prisoner Jerry Jerome Smith from execution even though he is mentally retarded.

Bobby Waldrop was sentenced to death in Randolph County, Alabama, even though his jury decided that he should be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, by a trial judge who said he was overriding the jury and imposing death because all of the other defendants he had sentenced to death were black.