Welcome to new followers! I tweet about con law, legal history, and political theory. I’m writing a book about Steve Bright, former public defender who ended up as one of the greatest death penalty lawyers of his generation. You’ll see some tweets about that project too. 
My book offers a kind of intellectual history of the ideas that mattered in the decades after SCOTUS reinstated the death penalty in 1976. What worked, what didn’t? We go from triage to the development of key principles: fairness, equality, effective representation.
Readers will learn how Steve and his band of fellow lawyers, staff, and interns respond to an avalanche of negative SCOTUS jurisprudence and develop an arsenal of arguments and tactics that begin to save lives.
My account also situates Steve’s life and work within the politics of mass incarceration, from how he experiences it as a young man to how he fights against its excesses as a budding lawyer and later as a public figure.
As America changed, so too the composition of the courts changed. This creates new obstacles to the pursuit of justice. Meanwhile, Steve thinks not much has changed in Southern courtrooms: you still had black defendants tried and sentenced to death often by all-white juries.
In that sense, the story of Steve Bright’s life work at @southerncenter is about showing fellow citizens all of the places left behind by the Civil Rights Movement.
I’ll leave you for now with an anecdote about Steve. Anyone who’s ever met him will instantly notice his personal warmth and ferocious sense of justice. What people don’t often know is that he reserves a place of perpetual torment for liars and hypocrites.
One of the objects of Steve’s ire for as long as I’ve known him—since the 90s—has been Morris Dees. Steve has repeatedly called Dees a “charlatan” and “fraud.” What he most resents is that SPLC once did direct representation but mostly got out of capital & prison work.
As Steve tells it, SPLC closed down its death penalty unit and stripped way down in prison & jail cases after Dees realized no one wanted to donate to such causes. Dees then stumbled upon the strategy of going after hate groups which brought tons of attention and millions.
Many in the public interest world called SPLC’s headquarters “the Poverty Palace.” To Steve, Dees had long ago sold out. When Steve was invited by then-Dean of Alabama Law Ken Randall to attend an event honoring Dees, he declined and gave this withering answer.
When Dees had his downfall in 2019, Steve had this choice quote in @NewYorker. It’s the only situation you’d ever see him revel in someone’s misfortune. I said to him, “You must have been holding on to that one for a long time!” He just grinned. /end
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