Stephen Bright is the Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights and teaches courses on the death penalty and criminal law at the Yale, Harvard, and Emory law schools.

The Southern Center for Human Rights is a public interest legal project based in Atlanta, which provides legal representation to persons facing the death penalty and to prisoners challenging unconstitutional conditions in prisons and jails throughout the South. The Center is also engaged in efforts to improve access to lawyers and the legal system for poor people accused of crimes and in prison, to bring about greater judicial independence, and to educate the public about these issues. He has been director of the Center since 1982.

Mr. Bright has represented persons facing the death penalty at trial, on appeals, and in post-conviction proceedings since 1979. He argued Amadeo v. Zant before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988, in which the death sentence was set aside because of racial discrimination. Before coming to the Center, he was a legal services attorney with the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, which provides assistance to poor people in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, a trial attorney with the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia, and director of the District of Columbia Law Students in Court Program, a trial practice clinic operated by a consortium of the law schools at the American, Catholic, George Washington, Georgetown, and Howard universities.

He has testified before committees of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and committees of the legislatures of Connecticut, Georgia and Texas. He has taught courses on capital punishment, criminal procedure, and prisoners' rights at the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Emory, Georgetown, Northeastern, and Florida State universities, and a course on international human rights law and capital punishment at the Institute on World Legal Problems in Innsbruck, Austria, conducted by St. Mary's University School of Law. He served on an American Bar Association Task Force that studied capital punishment issues in 1989-90.

His work and that of the Center have been featured in two books, Proximity to Death by William McFeely (Norton 1999) and Finding Life on Death Row by Kayta Lezin (Northeastern University Press 1999).

Mr. Bright received the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award in 1998; the Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty presented in 1991 by the American Civil Liberties Union; the Kutak-Dodds Prize, presented in 1992 by the National Legal Aid & Defender Association; and other awards.

Last updated April 16, 2002