The Attorney Who Walked Into Death Row

In 1989, Bryan Stevenson drove his beat-up Honda Civic from Harvard Law School to rural Alabama, where Walter McMillian sat on death row for a murder he did not commit. Stevenson had every reason to stay in Boston — prestigious firms were calling, comfortable futures were waiting. Instead, he chose to enter the most hopeless corridor in the American justice system, where condemned men lived in six-by-eight cells and guards eyed him with suspicion.

Stevenson did not write letters from a distance. He walked through the locked doors himself. He sat across from Walter, breathed the same stale air, and said, "I'm here to stand for you." For six years, the righteous advocate labored on behalf of a man the system had already discarded, until Walter finally walked free in 1993.

Peter tells us that Christ "suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God." The Almighty did not advocate from heaven's safe distance. He descended — through death, through the grave, even proclaiming victory to imprisoned spirits — so that He might bring us out the other side. And just as Noah's family passed through the waters of judgment into a remade world, baptism now marks our passage: not a scrubbing of skin, but a pledge of conscience before the Living God.

Christ walked into our death row. And He walked us out.