Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, will be coming to the Mary D’Angelo Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, September 13 at 7:00 p.m.

Stevenson is a lawyer and social activist who has dedicated his life to fighting discrimination within the criminal justice system. Nicholas Kristof, a writer for the New York Times, has called him “America’s Mandela.”

Stevenson is apart of the Equal Justice Initiative, which recently won a supreme court ruling that deemed mandatory life-without-parole sentencing for children under the age of 17 unconstitutional.

The event will center on the New York Times bestselling book, Just Mercy, which chronicles one of Stevenson’s first cases as a lawyer.

Just Mercy examines Stevenson’s start as a 23-year-old Harvard Law Student who is thrust into the world of the broken criminal justice system. His first assignment during an internship in Georgia was to deliver a message to a man living on death row, and this experience changed his life forever.

In his book, Stevenson profiles Walter McMillan, a young man who was at a barbeque with over a hundred people when he was accused of committing murder and ended up spending more than six years on death row.

Stevenson will present a moving account of this event and of the other lives he has defended over the years.

Stevenson’s pursuit of true justice and fight for the rights of those unjustly imprisoned has freed dozens of people from the miscarriage of the law. Admission for this event is free to the public, and tickets are available at the PAC box office starting on Wednesday, August 31.