Bryan Stevenson

And that's when we should perhaps give them a second chance because they're demonstrating so much remorse and regret.

What I now believe is that mercy isn't something that is dependent on what someone else does.

I think it's dependent on who we are.

I think we should give it to people, even when we're not seeing the regret and remorse that we'd like to see.

It's a way of moving through the world.

And to want mercy when we make mistakes, I believe, requires us to give mercy when other people make mistakes.

It doesn't mean that you don't demand respect and accountability when people do bad things.

It doesn't mean that you let people walk all over you.

But it does mean that you're not looking for the worst in others.

You're not trying to create a world...

of us versus them.

You're not trying to build division where you're on one side of the wall and other people on the other side of the wall, and they don't deserve mercy and you do.

It's the opposite of that.

It's the way in which we think about tearing down walls, creating less harm, less injury, less misunderstanding by being willing to give as much mercy as we hope people will give us.

Yeah, I think it's the beauty of a journey.

You keep learning things.

And I represented a man who was intellectually disabled.

He asked me to try to prevent his execution.

He'd already been through the appeals process.

Even though I knew it would be very hard to stop the execution, you know, we jumped in because our courts have actually banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities.