Stephen Bright

Stephen Bright (born 1947) is president and senior counsel for the [http://www.schr.org Southern Center for Human Rights] and teaches at Harvard University and Yale University Law Schools. He served as director of the Center from 1982 through 2005, where he developed a national reputation as an opponent of the death penalty.

Early life and education

Bright grew up on a family farm in Boyle County, Kentucky, the son of a conservative cattle and tobacco farmer. As a student at Boyle County High School, he planned to be a sports writer, writing stories for the Danville Advocate-Messenger. He began his undergraduate studies at the University of Kentucky (UK) in Lexington in fall 1965, and joined the Sigma Nu fraternity. He became involved with student government, switched his major from journalism to political science, and was elected student body president in 1970. [Bill Peterson, "Straight Radical," "The Courier-Journal and Times Magazine", November 15, 1970, pp. 10-15, 49.] Entering that office in a turbulent time of student demonstrations against the Vietnam war, the outspoken and controversial Bright earned a reputation as UK's "first liberal activist student president." [Joe Ward, "Steve's still stormy," "The Courier-Journal", April 11, 1971, pp. B1, B11.]

Legal career

Before coming to the Center, Bright was a legal services attorney in Appalachia, and a public defender and director of a law school clinical program in Washington, DC.

He has represented people facing the death penalty at trials and on appeals and prisoners in challenges to inhumane conditions and practices; written essays and articles on the right to counsel, racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, judicial independence, and other topics that have appeared in scholarly publications, books, magazines and newspapers; and testified before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He has also taught at the law schools at the University of Chicago, Emory University, Georgetown University, Northeastern University and other universities.

The Fulton County Daily Report named Bright [http://www.schr.org/aboutthecenter/news%20articles/news_agitator1.htm “Newsmaker of the Year”] in 2003 for his contribution to bringing about creation of a public defender system in Georgia. His work and the work of the Center have been the subject of a documentary film, "Fighting for Life in the Death Belt" [http://emproductions.net/] and two books, "Proximity to Death" by William McFeely (Norton, 1999) and "Finding Life on Death Row" by Kayta Lezin (Northeastern University Press, 1999).

Honors

Bright received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998; the American Civil Liberties Union’s Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty in 1991; the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s Kutak-Dodds Prize in 1992, honorary degrees from Emory, Northeastern, Louisville universities, the University of Central England, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and other awards.

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