Evan Reid '20 to fight injustice in the South through the Equal Justice Initiative
By Carla Meyer
This fall, Evan Reid ’20 will do what he set out to do when he enrolled at UC Davis Law – fight injustice in the South.
Reid, recipient of UC Davis Law’s 2020 Martin Luther King Jr. Service Award, will work on appellate arguments on death-penalty and other cases as a legal fellow for the Equal Justice Initiative. The EJI is the Alabama human rights organization headed by Bryan Stevenson, the law professor and lawyer spotlighted in the 2019 film “Just Mercy.”
A Georgia native, Reid entered King Hall with an eye toward capital habeas work. While at UC Davis, he crafted death penalty appellate arguments for the Federal Defender of the Eastern District of California and served as student director of the Restorative Justice Practicum. An EJI internship last summer led to the fellowship and to a return to the South, where he always planned to practice.
“I feel like I can make the biggest change by going back to my community in the South, where the death penalty has strong roots going back to slavery, and is still very prevalent,” Reid said. “I want to work to dismantle that system.”
Reid sees the death penalty as an emblem of “disparity in race, and economic injustice,” he said. “Through this whole mechanism, you are forced to confront a lot of ills in the criminal justice system.”
Those ills also are the source of massive, sustained nationwide protests that erupted after the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. The protests have attracted hundreds of thousands of people demanding an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
“George Floyd's murder was horrific, and his death underscores the extrajudicial violence that my community has suffered for over 400 years,” Reid said. “During my time at the EJI, I look forward to confronting the racial violence inherent in contemporary prosecution.”
He traces his interest in appellate work to the 2004 wrongful conviction case of Marcus Dixon, a teenager from Reid’s hometown of Rome, Ga. The Georgia Supreme Court overturned Dixon’s conviction on a child molestation charge that many had decried as racially motivated. Dixon went on to play in the NFL.
Reid was a child at the time, but the case made a big impression. So did advice from his school teacher mother and his father, who works in the auto industry.
“Growing up in Rome, Ga., my parents had to start a lot of really tough conversations” about the discrimination their children would face, Reid said. “What’s important is that during these conversations, they affirmed our intelligence, and they affirmed that no matter what, we must give back to the community.” Reid’s parents now count two lawyers in the family: Reid’s twin brother, Daniel, is a 2019 Charleston College of Law alum and public defender.
Reid attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater. There, he joined the Georgia Innocence Project and once witnessed closing arguments in a death penalty case. He left midway through, Reid said, sickened by seeing “a lot of people celebrating the potential death of this person.”
After Morehouse, he worked in Washington, D.C. as a policy analyst for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, where he met UC Davis Law alums who spoke highly of the school’s public interest tradition. After some research, Reid decided to add a J.D. from King Hall to his bachelor’s degree from King’s alma mater.
UC Davis Law “surrounded me with like-minded folks who sharpened my understanding of social justice issues,” Reid said. “And because of the smaller class sizes, professors were more accessible.”
He cites Professor Mary Louise Frampton, who teaches the Restorative Justice Practicum, as especially instrumental, along with Professors Jack Chin, Irene Joe and Elizabeth Joh.
Joe, a former New Orleans public defender who started her own legal career as an EJI legal fellow, encouraged Reid to apply for an internship there. She connected him with an EJI senior staff attorney who had been her colleague.
“I’m so glad Evan obtained this highly coveted fellowship,” Joe said. Reid’s “skills as a lawyer, and his commitment to ensuring the criminal justice system performs with integrity by respecting the basic humanity of marginalized people, will go a long way.”
One of the most significant recent developments regarding the death penalty occurred about 15 miles from where Reid attended law school. In March 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in Sacramento that placed a moratorium on the death penalty in California.
Reid called it “a first step.”
“Just letting folks sit on death row is unacceptable,” he said. “The next governor could come in and lift the moratorium. Hopefully, Californians will abolish the death penalty.”
Then Reid would like 27 other states with the death penalty to follow suit, so he can abandon the career dreams that brought him to Davis.
“The goal for me right now is to work until I don’t have a job, and it forces me on to a totally different career track,” Reid said.