When Alex Stein ’19 discovered a box of forgotten records in a library basement, he uncovered more than 100 cases of homicidal racial violence perpetrated by police officers in Jefferson County, Alabama.
But, unbeknown to him, he had also unearthed the nexus that would bring him back to CRRJ five years later as Program Director and Staff Attorney in 2024.
Stein, a Chicago Bulls fan who will proudly tell you that his hometown of Aurora is the second largest city by population in Illinois, joined Northeastern University School of Law in 2016. He was a student in CRRJ’s clinic during his 3L year, in the fall of 2018.
“At that point I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, and I had done two coops at public defender offices,” said Stein, in a recent interview with CRRJ. “Everyone was talking about the CRRJ clinic, and I always knew that I wanted to do it.”
Led that year by CRRJ’s Associate Director, Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick and then-Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellow, Associate Professor Melvin Kelley, Stein remembers the clinic as “very rigorous and hard.” He struggled initially to find enough information on the three cases he had been given by the professors, of which all that was initially known came from sparse newspaper clippings.
It was in one of these newspaper reports, however, that Stein first read mention of Charles Howard, killed by a Birmingham police officer in 1950. After records research and connecting with two of Howard’s surviving relatives, Stein discovered that the officer who had killed Howard, Jesse Lambert, had a violent history. Lambert was a serial killer who had viciously murdered several other Black people while on duty. “I found a lot of newspaper articles about the other killings he was involved in and what happened to his career after that,” said Stein.
His clinic studies ended as he headed into the winter, but encouraged by Burnham, Stein continued his investigation into officer Lambert. This work unearthed many more racialized killings committed by other police officers in Jefferson County.
The following spring, Stein undertook independent study with Burnham and travelled to Birmingham to further his investigations.
He visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the courthouse, and other government offices, following up on the FOIA request he had previously made.
“I spent most of that semester mostly looking at newspaper articles and secondary sources, until I found those index cards in Birmingham,” said Stein.
The archivists at the Birmingham Public library told Stein they had documents that might be of interest to him but that weren’t officially listed in their catalogue. He found boxes of records, unattended and decaying for almost 70 years. These index cards detailed the horrendous homicidal violence committed by law enforcement in the area.
“The Birmingham Police Department had somebody who made a little index card every time an officer killed somebody,” explained Stein. “There were 127 index cards containing basic information about the case; the victim’s name, the offending officers’ names, the investigating officer’s name, coroner’s findings — which was nearly always justifiable homicide — that type of information.” Of the victims in these cases, 123 (96%) were African American. Stein digitized these cards and brought the information back with him to Boston.
Weeks later, it was time for Stein to, once again, leave his research in the hands of CRRJ staff and students, before graduating and returning to Chicago, where he took on his first job as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney at Thedford Garber Law.
In March 2020, CRRJ hosted the convening “Remembrance and Repair: Police Violence in the Jim Crow Era” in Birmingham and Stein travelled back to attend. “It was interesting to see all the work that had been done since I left,” he said. “There were other students who had done a lot of work around those cases, so it was interesting to see this and meet the people who had been involved.”
As a result of Stein’s research, and CRRJ’s subsequent convenings, the Police Killings in Jefferson County, Alabama: 1930-1970 report was released in 2020. It contained a full account of CRRJ’s findings from its investigations into historical killings perpetrated by law enforcement in Birmingham and Jefferson County.
Little more than a year later, Stein began working at Cook County’s Public Defenders Office in Chicago, assigned to the family defense division. All of Stein’s clients were parents whose children had been taken away from them by the Department of Children and Family Services.
“I had the opportunity [at the Public Defender’s Office] to do some work that was more impactful on a broader scale and achieved some helpful changes in the law,” said Stein. In court every day, he spent almost three years at the office, taking part in more than 40 trials, “I won a lot of cases, and lots of my clients got their kids back.”
But, Stein said, after a few years of practice, he was eager to start challenging the inherent inequities within the legal system at the root. “It’s always nice to win, but it soon becomes very obvious how much a part of the system you are,” he said. The judicial system, as he witnessed in his practice, contributes to the “systematic surveillance and control of poor families, particularly poor Black families,” he said. “That was hard for me, and I wanted to teach. When the Program Director role at CRRJ came up it seemed like the right fit and the right time.”
He considered the decision to return to CRRJ and Northeastern carefully, leaving behind family, friends, and community in Chicago. But, Stein said he “came here because I felt like I had to. To be able to come back and do this work, there is no other place that you can do this and with this level of expertise and excellence. I couldn’t pass the opportunity up.”
Stein returned to CRRJ as a Staff Attorney and Program Director in 2024. “I view CRRJ as a way of building an educational and informational backdrop to support more transformational work,” he said. “I think that the work we do is significant to a lot of different communities and people who have been oppressed by the law.”
Having taught his first CRRJ clinic this spring, Stein also taught Race, Police Violence and Law with Burnham. “It’s really fun and it’s also really hard. I love giving the students readings that deepen their understanding of the issues that they already know. For example, we know that policing in America has its origins in slave patrols, it’s something we’ve heard but … how do you translate this knowledge to practicing law today?”
Besides academic rigor and teaching his students the practical legal skills required, Stein’s “goal is for all students, and lawyers, to be more humble, not necessarily more equivocal, but more respectful and hopeful.”
“One of the things I really like about working and teaching at CRRJ is that we have the opportunity to do things that maybe no one has ever done,” said Stein.
This year, clinic students investigated cases from the federal war department in the years surrounding WWII. “These things happened, the federal government knew, and they produced records about it. Then these records were sealed for 70 or 80 years. Now that they’re available, the students were the first people to see these documents in 80 years, it was a unique experience that you don’t get anywhere else, in any other class. That’s formative for students if they put the level of effort into it that it requires.”
Stein sees CRRJ’s work as delving into uncharted territory. “Every step you take is off the edge of the map,” said Stein. “It’s hard to do that, but if you want to be a great lawyer and help the world to be a little less terrible, then you need to do something that no one has ever done before.”
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