The Lawyer Who Held Their Hands

Bryan Stevenson was a young Harvard law student the first time he visited death row in Alabama. The man he met there — condemned, forgotten, sitting behind a mesh screen — had not been visited by his own attorney in years. Stevenson had no legal advice to offer that day. He had only come to introduce himself. But when the visit ended, the man began to weep. No one with any power had bothered to come.

Stevenson went back. And then he kept going back — for over thirty years. He founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, dedicating his life to defending the poorest defendants in the American legal system. Men and women who could not afford representation. Children tried as adults. People whose blood, in the eyes of the powerful, was cheap.

In Just Mercy, Stevenson writes, "The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice."

That single sentence echoes across three thousand years to the prayer of Psalm 72. The psalmist does not ask God to make the king wealthy or victorious. He asks that the king defend the cause of the poor, deliver the children of the needy, and regard their blood as precious in his sight. This is the measure of righteous authority — not how high it reaches, but how low it bends.

Every time someone with power kneels beside someone without it, the ancient prayer of Psalm 72 is answered again.