When African Americans are killed by the police, these lawyers receive a phone call

"The current battle is still alive to use these rights," he said.

In a series of interviews, lawyers spoke to CNN about their work, their motivations and their goals.

Lawyers practice at a time when cell phones and body cameras have captured deadly encounters with the police. Their tactics are strategic and media. Their goal is to hold violent officers accountable and force systemic changes in police operations in that country.

"When you hear our lawyer, we do not advocate a settlement, we plead in favor of an indictment," Merritt said. "We are pleading for a conviction."

The video that changed the story

Stewart arrived at the Scott family home in North Charleston, South Carolina, in the middle of the night, the day after Walter Scott's death. He wore only one gym bag and two suits, thinking that he would not be there long.

Stewart did not return home for two months.

"They started to need FedEx, costumes and clothes," he said.

Walter Scott's family had heard about this case – so they contacted Stewart.

The family was not convinced that the police's account of what had happened to Scott was accurate. Police said at that time that an officer had stopped Scott to ask him for a broken rear light, followed by a foot chase. The officer said that he had used a stun gun on Scott; Scott tried to take this weapon and the officer shot him.

"We knew my brother and his subject," Anthony Scott told CNN. "He's never been the kind of guy who would fight a cop."

Santana had sent a screenshot of the footage to an activist from Black Lives Matter, who informed Scott's family.

Santana went to one of Walter Scott's brothers to meet Stewart and his co-counsel, Justin Bamberg. But Santana did not want to stay there. he was afraid for his life. They drove around and eventually settled on an isolated parking lot, Stewart said.

It took Stewart and Bamberg several hours to convince Santana to show them the video and give it to them. It showed that police officer Michael Slager from North Charleston was shooting Scott in the back while he was running away. "It can not be real," Stewart remembered thinking when he watched the video. "A policeman would not dump on someone like that."

Late in the night, the lawyers handed the video to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. The public agency made it public a few days after Scott's murder.

The video changed the story of the shoot and provoked outrage across the country.

Slager was charged with murder and returned. Stewart also helped secure a $ 6.5 million settlement for the Scott family.

Filled with gratitude, Stewart and Scott's family gathered in the back room of the courthouse with the senior prosecutor after the sentencing.

They held hands in a circle and prayed. Stewart asked Scott's mother, Judy, to talk to the media.

Facing the reporters, she was holding a framed picture of her son against her chest as the nation watched her. Stewart spoke first.

He called it "a historic day for civil rights, especially in shootings involving officers". Stewart wanted to convey the magnitude of such a sentence for a police officer. This is the "best of inadequate justice" in civil rights cases, he said recalling that moment. "Everyone aspires, it's the responsibility."

"Nine times out of ten, families do not receive justice, the community does not respect justice and has just been struck off," Stewart said. "And that's okay, so it's just kind of an open and lasting wound."

Work takes its toll

In April 2017, Roy Oliver, then officer in Balch Springs, Texas, opened fire on a car full of teenagers as they passed in front of him, leaving a party. Police said they heard gunshots in front of the house. Oliver said that he thought the car was moving aggressively towards his partner.

Jordan Edwards, a passenger in the car, was shot in the head with a bullet.

The details of the assassination permeate the dreams of Merritt's lawyer, giving him nightmares – as Jordan's brothers describe it, a day when smoke rises from Jordan's forehead.

"Instead of being in Jordan, it's my 9-year-old child," he said.

Civil rights law is not an easy field, say the lawyers. Cases take years to settle. The work is disruptive.

Merritt battled depression. Online trolls forced Stewart to hire private security guards at his home during the Scott affair and when he represented the family of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black father who was shot dead by one of the two white officers confronted in front of him. Louisiana Convenience Store in 2016.

Crump has received phone calls and threatening letters over the years.

L. Chris Stewart, S. Merritt Lee and Benjamin Crump have united since their participation in a panel at a conference of the National Bar Association during the summer. They often speak in a group text that includes other civil rights lawyers. The conversation is vast and goes from legal strategy to university football to holiday greetings.

"What everyone respects from each other is that someone speeds up this process because there's just not a lot of people going to defend themselves in civil rights." "said Stewart.

In approaching new cases, the first step for prosecutors is to ensure that enough evidence is available and that public pressure is strong enough for charges to be laid.

Merritt was also successful with this strategy when he took the case of Botham Jean. Amber Guyger, a Dallas police officer on leave, fired two shots at Jean after claiming he had accidentally entered his apartment in a compound where she was also living.

Merritt's office obtained an affidavit from a witness claiming to have heard a knock on Jean's door shortly before Guyger, who was living just above Jean, had entered his apartment and had it. kill.

Merritt also called for Guyger to be fired and charged.

The roots of their strategy

Botham's mother Jean, Allison, had traveled to the United States on several occasions, but she did not know the justice system at the time of her son's death.

Botham's aunt, who lives in Florida, approached Crump. Allison Jean remembers him for his work representing the family of Trayvon Martin.

A senator from the state of Texas recommended Merritt, but Jean was still not sure. She asked a lawyer friend from St. Lucia to research Merritt. "Given what happened to my son, I looked at everyone with a lot of apprehension," said Jean, a former government official in St. Lucia.

But she quickly felt comfortable with Merritt, Crump and Daryl Washington, a Texas attorney. The three men spent up to 12 hours a day with her during her first week in Dallas, sometimes holding her hand, she said. Crump often checked if she had eaten.

"They met me at the hotel and they came to the … memorial service," she said. "They met me at the prosecutor's office, we just spent the whole day together for a week, they never left me," she said.

Merritt kept the company Jeans one night after a grand jury from Dallas County failed to indict Guyger on his first day of deliberation. He spent time playing dominoes with Allison Jean's husband.

"It helped to quell my anxiety," she said.

Getting to know the family and their loved ones is a crucial part of representing these cases, Crump said. Crump encouraged his clients to talk publicly about their loved ones in order to reshape the public narrative that concerns them.

"We have never met these young people of color, who were killed by the police, in life," Crump said. "We only meet them in death, and then we have to bring them back to life in the media."

Crump encourages families to help the world know the person they knew, not just the person described in a police report or shown in a gritty viral video.

"You will always be more effective in telling who Botham Jean was," he told Jean's family.

Because their legal strategy is often linked to media interviews and press conferences, some criticize the lawyers for sowing division – trying to make headlines rather than finding common ground.

Charley Wilkison, executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, a police union, said the police were often criticized and presumptive, but that they had the fundamental right to be presumed innocent until they were innocent. to the contrary.

Although the criminal justice system deserves criticism, he said, it is still important to find common ground.

"While we are preaching tolerance in the country, it is incumbent on us all to strike a balance, which is very unpopular right now in this country," he said.

"The tolerance that they claim is not practiced," he added.

In response, Merritt said that "when myself or other lawyers call the forces of order for their extremely dangerous and deadly culture unique in the world, that 's because it' s is really bad. "

"I do not know that they have that," he says. "The black community gets it."

How civil rights have become their vocation

Merritt, 36, became famous after representing Mark Hughes, the Dallas police man mistakenly identified as the suspect of the shooting death of five officers during a demonstration in July 2016 against the shooting involving the police.

Merritt said he had launched a campaign "to clarify it to the public eye".

He learned a lot from this legal strategy with Johnnie Cochran, lead counsel defending OJ Simpson when he was accused of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and his friend, Ron Goldman. "Cochran used to play in the media, use the media to create political pressure," he said.

Crump cited Judge Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court as a source of inspiration for his practice of law. In elementary school, Crump was bused to a new, predominantly white school in Lumberton, North Carolina. His mother worked in a factory and a hotel for a low wage.

He learned from his mother and his teachers that he could attend school because Marshall, then a NAACP attorney, had pleaded Brown v. Board of Education in the United States Supreme Court, which led to the desegregation of public schools.

"I want to be like Thurgood Marshall because I want it to be good for people who live in my community and those who look like me," said Crump.

His respect for Marshall even influences the way he decides what business to take. A case must "shock my conscience," he said.

Stewart's conscience was shocked by the injustice that he saw in a small Florida town more than ten years ago. The Tulane University graduate, who studied public health, was angered while sitting in a Florida room with a lawyer and residents who thought they had cancer.

At the time, Stewart worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, overseeing cancer clusters in low-income communities. Stewart heard the company's lawyers who owned a chemical plant near a water source – the alleged cause of cancer – mocking golf in another room.

This casual attitude irritated Stewart.

"If I see something that's wrong and I think I can do something, then I'm doing something," he said.

Lesser known characters on the front lines

For each of these lawyers in the national spotlight, there are many others that deal with civil rights issues across the country.

Before the birth of Michele K. Rayner-Goolsby, her parents were among the first black students to enroll at the University of South Florida in the 1960s. Her parents taught her to help others and to raise his community as he progresses. She remembered watching her mother, who was a social worker, giving a bag of food to a homeless client found in front of a grocery store.

Rayner-Goolsby had not planned to focus on civil rights cases, but during an internship in a Florida public defense office, she began meeting with clients who alleged that their rights had been violated. been violated.

The 37-year-old lawyer today represents the family of Markeis McGlockton, an unarmed black man who was shot and fatally wounded last summer during an altercation in a parking lot at a Clearwater convenience store. , in Florida, his hometown.

The sheriff of Pinellas County, Bob Gualtieri, first stated that he did not want to stop Michael Drejka, the man who had shot him, citing the law of the country. State "defend your soil". The law grants immunity to a person who uses lethal force if he reasonably believes that it is necessary to prevent imminent death or serious bodily harm, or to prevent a crime of strength.

Rayner-Goolsby spent this weekend protesting the ministry's decision. The next day, McGlockton's family sought his help. Drejka was later charged with manslaughter.

Although her colleagues have attracted more national attention in recent years, Rayner-Goolsby said "there are many women and queer people doing this job" who "are powerful voices in the first line". But they are often rejected for "charismatic male characters capable of attracting crowds," she said.

The fight goes on

While Stewart, Merritt and Crump have attracted national attention, they have received more and more requests to take cases.

In recent years, Stewart's office has received so many requests that he has had to turn down 90% of them.

In May, a Tarrant County grand jury indicted Tran, 36, for criminal negligence homicide, according to court documents.

Tran has not yet pleaded, according to the prosecutor's office of the Tarrant County Criminal District.

"He intends to plead not guilty and we will fight the charges in court," Tran's lawyer Robert L. Rogers told CNN.

Sometimes, says Stewart, his instinct tells him he should take a case.

This feeling came as he was in the Scott family home that night in North Charleston with a gym bag and two suits.

The family matriarch, Judy Scott, prayed for understanding and truth to come about, with everyone holding hands in the kitchen. Stewart stayed silently there. And at that time, he said, he knew he was doing what was right.