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2335 Bryan Stevenson Smallz & Raskind/Getty ImagesA Presumption of Guilt Bryan Stevenson Bryan Stevenson (b. 1959) is an internationally acclaimed lawyer, writer, and activist. He is a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law and has argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that offers legal representation to those who may have been wrongly accused and that guarantees the defense of anyone in Alabama on death row. Stevenson is the author of Just Mercy (2015), a New York Times best seller and winner of numerous awards that was made into a film in 2019. KEY CONTEXT In this article, published in the New York Review of Books in 2017, Stevenson connects America%u2019s history of slavery, the post%u2013Civil War racial discrimination of Jim Crow, and lynchings to contemporary questions about the criminal justice system and capital punishment. The title challenges the legal principle of %u201cpresumption of innocence%u201d %u2014 that one is innocent until proven guilty %u2014 which is one of the stated basic rights afforded to American citizens who stand accused of crimes. KEY CONTEXT In this article, published in the Late one night several years ago, I got out of my car on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to %u201cblow my head off.%u201d I%u2019d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood that I didn%u2019t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless submission. I begged the man not to shoot me, repeating over and over again, %u201cIt%u2019s all right, it%u2019s okay.%u201d The man was a uniformed police officer. As a criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking. I had to stay calm. I%u2019d just returned home from my law office in a car filled with legal papers, but I knew the officer holding the gun had not stopped me because he thought I was a young professional. Since I was a young, bearded black man dressed casually in jeans, most people would not assume I was a lawyer with a Harvard Law School degree. To the officer threatening to shoot me I looked like someone dangerous and guilty. I had been sitting in my beat-up Honda Civic for over a quarter of an hour listening to music that could not be heard outside the vehicle. There was a Sly and the Family Stone retrospective playing on a local radio station that had so engaged me I couldn%u2019t turn the radio off. It had been a long day at work. A neighbor must have been alarmed by the sight of a black man sitting in his car and called the police. My getting out of my car to explain to the police officer that this was my home and nothing criminal was taking place prompted him to pull his weapon. Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their threat of lethal force by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of my car, searched it illegally, and kept me on the street for fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors gathered to view the dangerous criminal in their midst. When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up in a computerized background check on me, I was told by the two officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt, they were right: I was lucky. Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.