Real Story

The Pennsylvania Prison Society proudly presents its 2024 Human Rights Champion Award to attorney Bradley S. Bridge.

As a longtime and newly retired public defender, Brad has brought freedom to hundreds of people sentenced as juveniles to life in Pennsylvania prisons.  In addition, his willingness to take on herculean tasks has yielded thousands of overturned convictions – convictions based on the testimony of police officers who lied. Thanks to Brad, thousands of people walk the street free today.

And to think it all started because he gave the finger to a bus driver in eighth grade.

Brad laughs when he tells the story.

The buses were lined up outside his school. Who knows what possessed Brad, then an eighth grader in the bus’s rear seat, to raise his middle finger to the driver of the bus parked behind him?

The driver “jumps out of the bus. He takes me to the principal’s office,” Brad recalled. When questioning Brad, the vice principal told him two witnesses, his friends David and Peter, confirmed the finger-raising. 

Hearing that, Brad confessed and was kicked off the bus for the rest of the year. “It was kind of a mess,” Brad said.

It turned out his friends were not even questioned; the vice principal had lied. And with that, Brad decided to become a lawyer.

“I was offended that the vice principal lied to me,” Brad said. “Children are manipulated and taken advantage of, so they need lawyers. I decided to go to law school based on the lie of a vice principal.

“I got into this business to help people to ameliorate bad situations and to vindicate people where vindication is a component,” Brad said.

And to stop the lying.

“Since 1995, we’ve been reopening convictions because of corrupt police officers. We’ve reopened and dismissed over 2,200 convictions,” Brad said.

Take, for example, the 472 dismissed drug and gun convictions involving former Philadelphia Police Officer Christopher Hulmes. In 2016, Hulmes, a 19-year police veteran, admitted lying in testimony against drug defendants.

Brad, along with lawyers and staff from the Defender Association and the District Attorney’s offices, partnered to identify and process the police cases. 

But the work that Brad is most famous for is freeing people sentenced as juveniles to life in prison. 

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutionally cruel to sentence juveniles to death for crimes committed while they were under 18. In 2016, the court affirmed that it was also unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison, and that the principle applied to past cases.

With those rulings, and related cases brought under Pennsylvania law, Brad and Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, along with teams of lawyers from the Defender Association of Philadelphia and the Juvenile Law Center, began combing through hundreds of convictions to search for people sentenced to life in prison when they were teens.

Appeal by appeal, Brad helped hundreds of people sentenced as young people in  Pennsylvania win their freedom. As of May 30, 497 out of 520 Pennsylvania "juvenile lifers" have been resentenced to lesser terms and 305 have been released, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Brad and his team managed 225 Philadelphia cases. 

“We went with the oldest cases first, people [who] had been in the longest, and we worked out most [of the cases] to sentences that would make them eligible for parole consideration immediately,” Brad said.

Among them was Joe Ligon. In 2021, Brad drove to State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County to bring Ligon home to Philadelphia. Ligon, then 83, had been in prison for 68 years, since he was 15 – the longest serving incarcerated person among the juvenile lifers.

“Ligon goes into prison in 1953, and I was born in 1953,” Brad said. “I thought, ‘This is crazy. This man has been in prison my entire life.’ I wanted to represent him personally. It was really remarkably wonderful to drive up in my car and pick him up and take him away.”

Also among them wasJohn Pace, of Philadelphia, who Brad believed had the ability to help other juvenile lifers. John served 31 years for a crime committed when he was 17.  At 56, he now works for the Youth Sentencing and Reentry Project helping other people acclimate to life in the community after decades in prison. 

“Brad’s never down,” John said. “Never complaining about nothing, very optimistic, always seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, always seeing the positive.”

Brad has been successful at many things, but he is failing at retirement. He maintains an office at the Defender Association, continuing, as a volunteer, to process cases relating to juvenile lifers and to convictions tainted by bad policing, and he has joined the Prison Society board of directors.

“Brad has done so much for so many. He is so smart and so knowledgeable, and has a bottomless heart. It's an honor to have him on the Board. He makes us a stronger organization every day." said Claire Shubik-Richards, Prison Society executive director.

“I started out when I was in eighth grade trying to figure out a way to help people, so I feel very good,” he said. “I feel I’ve done exactly that.”

We agree.