'True Justice' explores lawyer who defends death row inmates

Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson rarely slows down, friends and family say. It seems he's always looking over details on death penalty cases from his Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. If he's not speaking on the criminalization of black men, Stevenson is researching another historical site connected to an episode of racial violence.

But a new HBO documentary on Stevenson attempts to get him to sit, speak and explain why he believes the legacy of lynchings of African Americans in the U.S. is directly linked to those who have wrongly been put on death row. In his mind, racial structures of oppression have remained in the U.S. judicial system since the Jim Crow-era and the death penalty is merely their direct descendant.

"Most people don't know about our history of lynching," Stevenson told The Associated Press in a phone interview shortly after receiving news Friday that the Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence for Curtis Flowers , a Mississippi black man. "People have never been required to talk about it. But when you sit and think about it, the correlation is there."

FILE - This April 3, 2015 file photo shows attorney Bryan Stevenson, left, leaving Jefferson County jail in Birmingham, Ala., with Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row for the 1985 slaying of two fast-food managers. In the documentary, “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality,” airing Wednesday on HBO, Hinton talks about sitting on death row. (AP Photo Hal Yeager, File)

Stevenson said the white lynch mob transformed into a formal judicial process in which often white prosecutors, white judges and largely white juries are tasked with deciding if a poor, black male accused of a crime is sentenced to death.

"True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality," set to air Wednesday on HBO, shows how the Harvard-trained attorney is now dedicating his life to forcing the U.S. to face the violence experienced by its communities of color.

The Delaware-born Stevenson gained national attention in 1993 after he helped exonerate Walter McMillian, a 46-year-old black pulpwood worker on death row. McMillian had been sentenced to death for the 1986 fatal shooting of an 18-year-old white woman in an Alabama town where Harper Lee wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird." But Stevenson was able to prove that a key witness had lied and prosecutors withheld important evidence.

The attorney then helped exonerate Anthony Ray Hinton in 2015, an African American man who spent 30 years on death row in Alabama after he was convicted for the 1985 slaying of two fast-food managers. Stevenson was able to show that experts could prove Hinton's mother's gun, the one prosecutor said was using in the killings, couldn't have been the one used in the shooting.

In the documentary, Hinton talks about sitting on death row and being forced to smell the burning flesh of other inmates in the electric chair as a jail guard taunted him.

The film comes as the country prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of "Red Summer" — a period in 1919 when white mobs attacked and murdered African Americans in dozens of cities across the U.S. Hundreds of African Americans, some still in their World War I uniforms, were lynched, tortured and forced from homes amid heightened racial tensions and the rise of the revived Ku Klux Klan.

It also comes as Latino academics and activists with the group Refusing to Forget are working to educate the public on violence committed by white mobs and the Texas Rangers that claimed thousands of people of Mexican descent in the American Southwest from 1910 to 1920.

Stevenson said he hopes the documentary helps other communities of color think about how they can memorialize historical sites connect to their unique past. But he said African Americans have a distinct history connected to slavery and that should not be ignored.

"This kind of lawlessness affected all kinds of communities of color," Stevenson said. "But it's not the same. Lynching starts with enslavement. Black people didn't come here as immigrants."

"True Justice" will be available on HBO NOW, HBO GO, and other streaming platforms.

Russell Contreras is a member of The Associated Press' race and ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/russcontreras .

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez is set Thursday to deliver her first state of the union speech, addressing an anxious country as she navigates competing pressures from the United States – which toppled her predecessor less than two weeks ago – and a government loyal to former President Nicolás Maduro.

The speech comes one day after Rodríguez said her government would continue releasing prisoners detained under Maduro in what she described as “a new political moment” since his ouster by the United States earlier this month.

In her address to the National Assembly, which is controlled by the country's ruling party, Rodríguez is expected to explain her vision for her government, including potential changes to the state-owned oil industry that U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to reinvigorate since Maduro’s seizure.

On Thursday, Trump met at the White House with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose political party is widely considered to have won 2024 elections rejected by Maduro. But in endorsing Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president since 2018, Trump has sidelined Machado.

After acknowledging a Tuesday call with Trump, Rodríguez said on state television that her government would use “every dollar” earned from oil sales to overhaul the nation’s public health care system. Hospitals and other health care facilities across the country have long been crumbling, and patients are asked to provide practically all supplies needed for their care, from syringes to surgical screws.

The acting president must walk a tightrope, balancing pressures from both Washington and top Venezuelan officials who hold sway over Venezuela's security forces and strongly oppose the U.S. Her recent public speeches reflect those tensions — vacillating from conciliatory calls for cooperation with the U.S., to defiant rants echoing the anti-imperialist rhetoric of her toppled predecessor.

American authorities have long railed against a government they describe as a “dictatorship,” while Venezuela’s government has built a powerful populist ethos sharply opposed to U.S. meddling in its affairs.

For the foreseeable future, Rodríguez's government has been effectively relieved of having to hold elections. That's because when Venezuela’s high court granted Rodríguez presidential powers on an acting basis, it cited a provision of the constitution that allows the vice president to take over for a renewable period of 90 days.

Trump enlisted Rodríguez to help secure U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil sales despite sanctioning her for human rights violations during his first term. To ensure she does his bidding, Trump threatened Rodríguez earlier this month with a “situation probably worse than Maduro.”

Maduro, who is being held in a Brooklyn jail, has pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking charges.

Before Rodríguez’s speech on Thursday, a group of government supporters was allowed into the presidential palace, where they chanted for Maduro, who the government insists remains the country’s president. “Maduro, resist, the people are rising,” they shouted.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodriguez makes a statement to the press at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodriguez, center, smiles flanked by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, right, and National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez after making a statement to the press at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)