No Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row

This chapter profiles Stevenson, the anti-death-penalty lawyer who represented Roy and Mark. In her preface, Kuklin describes auditing one of Stevenson’s classes at NYU Law School. She notes his calm, smiling demeanor, which betrayed no hint of the long night he spent preparing an oral argument to make before the Supreme Court. The case he would argue considered whether execution by lethal injection may, in some or all cases, violate the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Kuklin shifts to her interview with Stevenson, which comprises the rest of the chapter. Stevenson believes that “gratuitous” violence is very “troubling,” by which he means not only violent crimes but also capital punishment and the American penal system itself. To him, violence as a cure for violence is untenable and can only create a vicious circle. The only solution, he suggests, lies in prevention: looking at the roots of violent behavior, including poverty, despair, hopelessness, and racism. His religious upbringing gives him faith in the possibility of redemption—a belief that human beings, if valued and treated with dignity, can grow and change, whatever they might have done in the past.

Stevenson, who is African American, grew up in an impoverished, segregated region of rural Delaware.