Cocktails & Conversations with Bryan Stevenson and Damien Echols at First-Year Experience® 2015

• published: 05 Mar 2015
• views: 37

Bryan Stevenson, author of JUST MERCY: A STORY OF JUSTICE AND REDEMPTION (Random House) and Damien Echols, author of LIFE AFTER DEATH (Plume) in conversation on social justice at the First-Year Experience® (FYE) 2015 Conference in Dallas, TX. Moderated by New York Times journalist and MORE AWESOME THAN MONEY: FOUR BOYS AND THEIR HEROIC QUEST TO SAVE YOUR PRIVACY FROM FACEBOOK (Viking) author Jim Dwyer. BRYAN STEVENSON is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a tenured professor of law at New York University Law School. He has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. DAMIEN ECHOLS was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. At age eighteen he was wrongfully convicted of murder, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley, Jr. Echols received a death sentence and spent almost eighteen years on Death Row, until he, Baldwin, and Misskelley were released in 2011. The West Memphis Three have been the subject of Paradise Lost, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and West of Memphis, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Echols is the author of Almost Home,the New York Times bestseller, Life After Death, and, with his wife Lorri Davis, Yours for Eternity. He lives in New York.