Stephen Bright, A lawyer who gave up his big-city law career to
defend death-row inmates and prisoners denied medical care
Bob Edwards, host:
This is Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Bob Edwards.
With the rise and fall of the dot-com sector, there have been a lot of stories about entrepreneurs striving to create successful companies and becoming millionaires. There are a lot of people who work just as hard to launch non-profit enterprises. Some consider them to be social entrepreneurs. NPR's Chris Arnold profiles an Atlanta lawyer who spent the last 20 years building an organization to help prisoners who can't afford an attorney.
CHRIS ARNOLD reporting:
A dinner in Silicon Valley drew dozens of wealthy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and corporate lawyers who spend their days immersed in the high-tech business world. But this evening, they're being asked to invest their money in a different kind of venture, the Southern Center for Human Rights, which is run by a lawyer named Stephen Bright.
STEPHEN BRIGHT (Attorney): It's my guess that most of you have not dealt a great deal with the criminal justice system or with--I guess I'm right about that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
ARNOLD: Stephen Bright didn't mean that as a joke and the reaction underscores how removed this audience is from the prisoners' rights work that he does. To put a human face on these issues, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who's on the center's board, is here to talk about the 19 years he spent wrongfully incarcerated.
RUBIN "HURRICANE" CARTER: Defending people in prison is not a popular thing. Those people who have the money who can be philanthropic, their lives are not disturbed.
ARNOLD: But while there are different worlds colliding here, the high-tech investors that organized this event think Stephen Bright shares many of the same skills and traits that mark successful entrepreneurs. After growing up on a family farm in Kentucky, Bright became a lawyer and moved to Washington, DC. One day in 1979, he got a phone call from the ACLU requesting that he take a death penalty case in Georgia, which was odd, Bright thought, since he had no experience with the death penalty or Georgia state law. But Bright was told the client was desperate because Georgia does not provide lawyers to death-row inmates after they've lost their first appeal.
BRIGHT: They needed a lawyer, which just struck--I couldn't believe somebody was under a death sentence and doesn't have a lawyer. It was just really shocking to me.
ARNOLD: Bright took the case and he took others that the ACLU brought to him. He says he continued to be shocked by a whole range of problems within the criminal justice system in the South. He says he saw court-appointed lawyers who were drunk or asleep during trials, prisoners being abused, and in 1982, he decided to move to Atlanta to take over a small prisoners' rights center that was bankrupt and falling apart.
BRIGHT: The problems down here were so major and there was such a need here.
ARNOLD: Bright didn't take a salary for nine months and spent most of his savings. Over the past 20 years, he's dedicated his life to building the Southern Center for Human Rights.
(Soundbite of storm)
ARNOLD: On the morning we visited the center, a spectacular thunderstorm provided an appropriately Vognarian(ph) backdrop.
(Soundbite of storm)
ARNOLD: Inside the front door of the downtown Atlanta center, a copy machine cranks endlessly away. Bright now has a staff of 25, including nine investigators and 11 lawyers. Many of the young attorneys come from Harvard, Yale and Emory where Bright teaches courses. Yale graduate Tammy Sun gave up a hundred thousand dollar a year salary at a big firm to work here for $30,000 a year.
TAMMY SUN (Yale Graduate): We certainly are not here for the money.
ARNOLD: The center gets no government funding whatsoever, raising its entire budget from private contributions. The clients can't afford to pay anything. Bright can only offer subsistence salaries. So as a business proposition, the level of difficulty is in some ways higher than it is at a for-profit company. Still, Tammy Sun says the around-the-clock work environment here is very similar to what it's like at high-tech start-ups where some of her friends work.
SUN: The sleeping under the desk thing, I mean, frankly I don't think Steve sleeps. I also think it's believing in what you're doing and whether it's, you know, the entrepreneur who's building his e-commerce company or it's someone like Steve Bright or Steve, you know, building something from the ground up and nurturing it.
ARNOLD: Sun says the difference here is that while the economic incentives are non-existent, the work itself is more gripping than she's found anywhere else.
STOYIN McHANEY: I was about to go crazy. I didn't know who to talk to.
ARNOLD: Forty-four-year-old Stoyin McHaney recently became a client when the center sued the Fulton County jail in Georgia over inadequate medical care. McHaney is HIV positive. He says he has substance abuse and alcohol abuse problems and was arrested on a minor charge. McHaney says despite his pleading for his medication, the jail nurses failed to give him his protease inhibitors for as long as 45 days, then gave him the wrong medications. And he says they kept him in a cell with a very sick inmate.
McHANEY: And I couldn't believe that those people were continuing to allow me to go on and on and on without putting me back on a life-sustaining drug. That was just driving me insane.
ARNOLD: McHaney was not alone. Stephen Bright says scores of inmates arrested on petty charges were being denied medical care.
BRIGHT: Renaldi Usher(ph), one of our clients, was a man who...
ARNOLD: At the fund-raising dinner in Silicon Valley, the light-hearted spirit of the crowd has grown dead somber as Stephen Bright recounts the story of another HIV-infected inmate at the Fulton County jail.
BRIGHT: He was arrested for shoplifting $ 40 at the Home Depot. When he came in, he was taking his protease inhibitors. He was healthy. He was almost 200 pounds. He was taken off his medicine cold turkey and he was put in a cell with two people that had TB. And by the time we got to know Rudy(ph), he was down to a hundred and twenty pounds. The jail released him at 12 midnight. He can't walk anymore. And so Rudy crawled into a parking lot and underneath a car. The next morning, he called us and someone from the office picked him up and got him breakfast and cleaned him up. Rudy Usher died just a month ago.
ARNOLD: Records introduced before the lawsuit was settled last year showed that 23 inmates died at the Fulton County jail in a period of two years. A court-appointed medical monitor says most of those deaths were due to severe illness during a time when medical care was, quote, "appalling." The federal district judge in the case used the word 'horrendous' to describe the jail conditions and mandated reforms. Since then, the monitor reports a dramatic improvement and only two deaths, one from suicide over the past year.
Work like this has won Bright praise from prominent judges and lawyers, but trying cases, teaching and fund-raising takes a toll. While Bright looks slender and fit, he's had a heart condition and friends worry that he pushes himself too hard. Bright has had two marriages fall apart. When Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Leventhal looks at Stephen Bright, he sees the same intense drive and singularity of purpose shared by some of the most visionary entrepreneurs.
MICHAEL LEVENTHAL (Venture Capitalist): The characteristics we look for in an entrepreneur. You know, it is that passion, ability to lead people--Steve has all that. And you see the command he has over an audience, whether it be the audience of two or the audience of 200. People just realize that there's this tremendous sort of gravitational force, if you will. He's truly that sort of magical kind of person in the ways of, you know, the Ellisons and the Jobs and the Jim Clarks.
ARNOLD: Bright doesn't see himself as all that remarkable and maintains an all-in-a-day's-work sort of attitude. And as for making some noble sacrifice in terms of his small paycheck, Bright shrugs that off, too. He says he's never wanted to do anything else and seems genuinely puzzled about why so many talented people choose to spend their lives making a lot of money but working on things that he sees as much less vital. He, of course, is interested in raising money for his center's work. And to that end, Mike Leventhal wants to invest in Bright. As a result of the fund-raising dinner, Leventhal is close to raising a million dollars, enough to fund Bright's center for a full year.
Chris Arnold, NPR News, San Francisco.
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