3/07/01--Stephen Bright, the leading anti-death penalty lawyer in the country, will speak at Boston College Law School on Friday, March 9th at 4:00 pm. His talk, "Will the Death Penalty Survive the 21st Century: International Trends, Arbitrariness, and Discrimination" is open to the community and will be held in the East Wing building, room 120.

"If you haven't heard Steve Bright before, you owe it to yourself to attend," said BCLS Professor Phyllis Goldfarb, who organized the appearance as part of her class on the death penalty. "He is a leading national and international commentator on death penalty issues specifically and public interest law issues generally, a terrific and engaging speaker as well as a fabulous role model for the law school community."

Bright is the Founder and Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a public interest legal project based in Atlanta which provides legal representation to persons facing the death penalty and to prisoners challenging unconstitutional conditions in prisons and jails throughout the South. The Center is also engaged in efforts to improve access to lawyers and the legal system by poor people accused of crimes and in prison, and to bring about greater judicial independence. He has been director of the Center since 1982, and also teaches courses on the death penalty and criminal law at the Yale and Emory law schools.

Bright has represented persons facing the death penalty at trial, on appeals and in post-conviction proceedings since 1979. He argued Amadeo v. Zant before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988, in which the death sentence was set aside because of racial discrimination. His articles include "Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime, but for the Worst Lawyer," which appeared in the Yale Law Journal, and "Discrimination, Death and Denial: The Tolerance of Racial Discrimination in the Infliction of the Death Penalty," published by the Santa Clara Law Review, among many others. He has also contributed chapters to books and articles to magazines and newspapers, and has testified before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and committees of the legislatures of Connecticut, Georgia and Texas. He served on an American Bar Association Task Force that studied capital punishment issues and made recommendations, ultimately adopted by the American Bar Association with minor modification, to the U.S. Congress about how to improve the fairness of the process by which people are sentenced to death.

Bright has taught courses on capital punishment, criminal procedure, and prisoners' rights at the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Emory, Georgetown, Northeastern, and Florida State universities, and a course on international human rights law and capital punishment at the Institute on World Legal Problems in Innsbruck, Austria, conducted by St. Mary's University School of Law.

He received the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award, presented at the ABA Annual Meeting in 1998; the Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty presented in 1991 by the American Civil Liberties Union; the Kutak-Dodds Prize, presented in 1992 by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association; and other awards.