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Chapter Three

Trials and Tribulation

After months of frustration, failure, and growing public scorn, Sheriff Thomas Tate, ABI lead investigator Simon Benson, and the district attorney’s investigator, Larry Ikner, decided to arrest Walter McMillian based primarily on Ralph Myers’s allegation. They hadn’t yet done much investigation into McMillian, so they decided to arrest him on a pretextual charge while they built their case. Myers claimed to be terrified of McMillian; one of the officers suggested to Myers that McMillian might have sexually assaulted him; the idea was so provocative and inflammatory that Myers immediately recognized its usefulness and somberly acknowledged that it was true. Alabama law had outlawed nonprocreative sex, so officials planned to arrest McMillian on sodomy charges.

On June 7, 1987, Sheriff Tate led an army of more than a dozen officers to a back-country road that they knew Walter would use on his return home from work. Officers stopped Walter’s truck and drew their weapons, then forced Walter from his vehicle and surrounded him. Tate told him he was under arrest. When Walter frantically asked the sheriff what he had done, the sheriff told him that he was being charged with sodomy. Confused by the term, Walter told the sheriff that he did not understand the meaning of the word. When the sheriff explained the charge in crude terms, Walter was incredulous and couldn’t help but laugh at the notion. This provoked Tate, who unleashed a torrent of racial slurs and threats. Walter would report for years that all he heard throughout his arrest, over and over again, was the word nigger. “Nigger this,” “nigger that,” followed by insults and threats of lynching.

“We’re going to keep all you niggers from running around with these white girls. I ought to take you off and hang you like we done that nigger in Mobile,” Tate reportedly told Walter.

The sheriff was referring to the lynching of a young African American man named Michael Donald in Mobile, about sixty miles south. Donald was walking home from the store one evening, hours after a mistrial was declared in the prosecution of a black man accused of shooting a white police officer. Many white people were shocked by the verdict and blamed the mistrial on the African Americans who had been permitted to serve on the jury. After burning a cross on the courthouse lawn, a group of enraged white men who were members of the Ku Klux Klan went out searching for someone to victimize. They found Donald as he was walking home and descended on him. After severely beating the young black man, they hanged him from a nearby tree, where his lifeless body was discovered several hours later.

Local police ignored the obvious evidence that the death was a hate crime and hypothesized that Donald must have been involved in drug dealing, which his mother adamantly denied. Outraged by the lack of local law enforcement interest in the case, the black community and civil rights activists persuaded the United States Department of Justice to get involved. Three white men were arrested two years later and details of the lynching were finally made public.

It had been more than three years since the arrests, but when Tate and the other officers started making threats of lynching, Walter was terrified. He was also confused. They said he was being arrested for raping another man, but they were throwing questions at him about the murder of Ronda Morrison. Walter vehemently denied both allegations. When it became clear that the officers would get no help from Walter in making a case against him, they locked him up and proceeded with their investigation.

When Monroe County District Attorney Ted Pearson first heard his investigators’ evidence against Walter McMillian, he must have been disappointed. Ralph Myers’s story of the crime was pretty far-fetched; his knack for dramatic embellishment made even the most basic allegations unnecessarily complicated.

Here’s Myers’s account of the murder of Ronda Morrison: On the day of the murder, Myers was getting gas when Walter McMillian saw him at the gas station and forced him at gunpoint to get in Walter’s truck and drive to Monroeville. Myers didn’t really know Walter before that day. Once in the truck, Walter told Myers he needed him to drive because Walter’s arm was hurt. Myers protested but had no choice. Walter directed Myers to drive him to Jackson Cleaners in downtown Monroeville and instructed him to wait in the truck while McMillian went inside alone. After waiting a long time, Myers drove down the street to a grocery store to buy cigarettes. He returned ten minutes later. After another long wait, Myers finally saw McMillian emerge from the store and return to the truck. Upon entering the truck, he admitted that he had killed the store clerk. Myers then drove McMillian back to the gas station so that Myers could retrieve his vehicle. Before Myers left, Walter threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone what he had seen or done.

In summary, an African American man planning a robbery-murder in the heart of Monroeville in the middle of the day stops at a gas station and randomly selects a white man to become his accomplice by asking him to drive him to and from the crime scene because his arm is injured, even though he had been able to drive himself to the gas station where he encountered Myers and to drive his truck home after returning Myers to the gas station.

Law enforcement officers knew that Myers’s story would be very difficult to prove, so they arrested Walter for sodomy, which served to shock the community and further demonize McMillian; it also gave police an opportunity to bring Walter’s truck to the jail for Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, to see.

Bill Hooks was a young black man with a reputation as a jailhouse snitch. He had been in the county jail for several days on burglary charges when McMillian was arrested. Hooks was promised release from jail and reward money if he could connect McMillian’s truck to the Morrison murder. Hooks eagerly told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners near the time of the crime and had seen a truck tear away from the cleaners with two men inside. At the jail, Hooks positively identified Walter’s truck as the one he’d seen at the cleaners nearly six months earlier.

This second witness gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillian with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison.

When the indictment was announced, there was joy and relief in the community that someone had been charged. Sheriff Tate, the district attorney, and other law enforcement officers who had become targets of criticism were cheered. The absence of an arrest had disrupted life in Monroeville, and now things could settle down.

People who knew Walter found it difficult to believe he could be responsible for a sensational murder. He had no history of crime or violence, and for most folks who knew him, robbery just didn’t make sense for a man who worked as hard as Walter.

Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man. Tate still had not investigated McMillian himself, his life or background, or even his whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew about the affair with Karen Kelly and had heard the suspicion and rumors that Walter’s independence must mean he was dealing drugs. Given his eagerness to make an arrest, this seemed to be enough for Tate to accept Myers’s accusations. As it turned out, on the day of the murder, a fish fry was held at Walter’s house. Members of Walter’s family spent the day out in front of the house, selling food to passersby. Evelyn Smith, Walter’s sister, was a local minister, and she and her family occasionally raised money for the church by selling food on the roadside. Because Walter’s house was closer to the main road, they often sold from his front yard. There were at least a dozen church parishioners at the house all morning with Walter and his family on the day Ronda Morrison was murdered.

Walter didn’t have a tree job that day. He had decided to replace the transmission in his truck and called over his mechanic friend, Jimmy Hunter, to help. By 9:30 in the morning, the two men had dismantled Walter’s truck, completely removing the transmission. By 11 o’clock, relatives had arrived and had started frying fish and other food to sell. Some church members didn’t get there until later.

“Sister, we would have been here long ago, but the traffic in Monroeville was completely backed up. Cop cars and fire trucks, looked like something bad happened up at that cleaners,” Evelyn Smith recalled one of the members saying.

Police reported that the Morrison murder took place around 10:15 A.M., eleven miles or so from McMillian’s home, at the same time that a dozen church members were at Walter’s home selling food while Walter and Jimmy worked on his truck. In the early afternoon, Ernest Welch, a white man whom black residents called “the furniture man” because he worked for a local furniture store, arrived to collect money from Walter’s mother for a purchase she had made on credit. Welch told the folks gathered at the house that his niece had been murdered at Jackson Cleaners that morning. They discussed the shocking news with Welch for some time.

Taking into account the church members, Walter’s family, and the people who were constantly stopping at the house to buy sandwiches, dozens of people were able to confirm that Walter could not have committed the murder. That group included a police officer who stopped by the house to buy a sandwich and noted in his police log that he had bought food at McMillian’s house with Walter and a crowd of church folks present.

Based on their personal knowledge of Walter’s whereabouts at the time of the Morrison murder, family members, church members, black pastors, and others all pleaded with Sheriff Tate to release McMillian. Tate wouldn’t do it. The arrest had been too long in the making to admit yet another failure. After some discussion, the district attorney, the sheriff, and the ABI investigator agreed to stick with the McMillian accusation.

Walter’s alibi wasn’t the only problem for law enforcement. Ralph Myers began to have second thoughts about his allegations against McMillian. He was also facing indictment in the Morrison murder. He’d been promised that he wouldn’t get the death penalty and would get favorable treatment in exchange for his testimony, but it was starting to dawn on him that admitting to involvement in a high-profile murder that he actually had nothing to do with was probably not smart.

A few days before the capital murder charges against McMillian were made public, Myers summoned police investigators and told them his allegations against McMillian weren’t true. At this point, Tate and his investigators had little interest in Myers’s recantation. Instead, they decided to pressure Myers to produce more incriminating details. When Myers protested that he didn’t have more incriminating details because, well, the story wasn’t true, the investigators weren’t having it. It’s not clear who decided to put both Myers and McMillian on death row before trial to create additional pressure, but it was a nearly unprecedented maneuver that proved very effective.

It is illegal to subject pretrial detainees like Walter and Myers to confinement that constitutes punishment. Pretrial detainees are generally housed in local jails, where they enjoy more privileges and more latitude than convicted criminals who are sent to prison. Putting someone who has not yet been tried in a prison reserved for convicted felons is almost never done. As is putting someone not yet convicted of a crime on death row. Even the other death row prisoners were shocked. Death row is the most restrictive punitive confinement permitted. Prisoners are locked in a small cell by themselves for twenty-three hours a day. Condemned inmates have limited opportunity for exercise or visitation and are held in disturbingly close proximity to the electric chair.

Sheriff Tate drove Walter to Holman Correctional Facility, a short ride away in Atmore, Alabama. Before the trip, the sheriff again threatened Walter with racial slurs and terrifying plans. It’s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman’s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer. The transfer of Myers and McMillian from the county jail to death row took place on August 1, 1987, less than a month before the scheduled execution of Wayne Ritter.

When Walter McMillian arrived on Alabama’s death row—just ten years after the modern death penalty was reinstituted—an entire community of condemned men awaited him. Most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975 were black, although to Walter’s surprise nearly 40 percent of them were white. Everyone was poor, and everyone asked him why he was there.

Condemned prisoners on Alabama’s death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable. Each death row inmate was placed in a five-by-eight-foot cell with a metal door, a commode, and a steel bunk. The temperatures in August consistently reached over 100 degrees for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Incarcerated men would trap rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes they found inside the prison to pass the time and to keep safe. Isolated and remote, most prisoners got few visits and even fewer privileges.

Existence at Holman centered on Alabama’s electric chair. The large wooden chair was built in the 1930s, and inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes. They called it “Yellow Mama.” The executions at Holman resumed just a few years before Walter arrived. John Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted in Holman’s execution chamber. Russ Canan, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans. Evans filmed what became an after-school special for kids where he shared the story of his life with schoolchildren and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made.

After courts refused to block the Evans execution following multiple appeals, Canan went to the prison to witness the execution at Evans’s request. It was worse than Russ could have ever imagined. He later filed a much-reviewed affidavit describing the entire horrific process: At 8:30 P.M. the first jolt of 1,900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans’s body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted from the electrode tied to Mr. Evans’s left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of greyish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans’s face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead.

The electrode on the left leg was refastened. At 8:30 P.M. [sic] Mr. Evans was administered a second thirty-second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. Evans. The doctors reported that his heart was still beating, and that he was still alive.

At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request for clemency was denied.

At 8:40 P.M., a third charge of electricity, thirty seconds in duration, was passed through Mr. Evans’s body. At 8:44, the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes.

Walter McMillian knew nothing about any of this before he arrived at Holman. But with another scheduled execution fast approaching, condemned prisoners were talking about the electric chair constantly when Walter arrived. For his first three weeks on Alabama’s death row, the horrific execution of John Evans was pretty much all he heard about.

The surreal whirlwind of the preceding weeks had left Walter devastated. After living his whole life free and unrestrained by anyone or anything, he found himself confined and threatened in a way he could never have imagined. The intense rage of the arresting officers and the racist taunts and threats from uniformed police officers who did not know him were shocking. He saw in the people who arrested him and processed him at the courthouse, even in other inmates at the jail, a contempt that he’d never experienced before. He had always been well liked and gotten along with just about everybody. He genuinely believed the accusations against him had been a serious misunderstanding and that once officials talked to his family to confirm his alibi, he’d be released in a couple of days. When the days turned into weeks, Walter began to sink into deep despair. His family assured him that the police would soon let him go, but nothing happened.

His body reacted to the shock of his situation. A lifelong smoker, Walter tried to smoke to calm his nerves, but at Holman he found the experience of smoking nauseating and quit immediately. For days he couldn’t taste anything he ate. He couldn’t orient or calm himself. When he woke each morning, he would feel normal for a few minutes and then sink into terror upon remembering where he was. Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face. Looking in a mirror, he didn’t recognize himself.

The county jails where Walter had been housed before his transfer were awful. But the small, hot prison cell on Holman’s death row was far worse. He was used to working outside among the trees with the scent of fresh pine on the cool breeze. Now he found himself staring at the bleak walls of death row. Fear and anguish unlike anything he’d ever experienced settled on Walter.

Death row prisoners were constantly advising him, but he had no way of knowing whom to believe. The judge had earlier appointed an attorney to represent him, a white man Walter didn’t trust. His family raised money to hire the only black criminal lawyers in the region, J. L. Chestnut and Bruce Boynton from Selma. Chestnut was fiery and had done a lot of work in the black community to enforce civil rights. Boynton’s mother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was a legendary activist; Boynton himself had strong civil rights credentials as well.

Despite their collective experience, Chestnut and Boynton failed to persuade local officials to release Walter and couldn’t prevent his transfer to Holman. If anything, hiring outside lawyers seemed to provoke Monroe County officials even more. On the trip to Holman, Tate was furious that McMillian had involved outside counsel; he mocked Walter for thinking it would make any difference. Although the money to hire Chestnut and Boynton was raised by family members through church donations and by financing their meager possessions, local law enforcement interpreted it as evidence of Walter’s secret money hoard and double life—confirmation that he wasn’t the innocent black man he pretended to be.

Walter tried to adjust to Holman, but things only got worse. With a scheduled execution approaching, people on the row were agitated and angry. Other prisoners had advised him to take action and file a federal complaint, since he couldn’t legally be held on death row. When Walter, who could barely read or write, failed to file the various pleadings, writs, motions, and lawsuits the other prisoners had advised him to file, they blamed him for his predicament.

“Fight for yourself. Don’t trust your lawyer. They can’t put you on death row without being convicted.” Walter heard this constantly, but he couldn’t imagine how to file a pleading in court himself.

“There were days when I couldn’t breathe,” Walter recalled later. “I hadn’t ever experienced anything like this before in my life. I was around all these murderers, and yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help me. I prayed, I read the Bible, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I was scared, terrified just about every day.” Ralph Myers was faring no better. He had also been charged with capital murder in the death of Ronda Morrison, and his refusal to continue cooperating with law enforcement meant that he was sent to death row, too. He was placed on a different tier to prevent contact with McMillian. Whatever advantage Myers thought he could gain by saying he knew something about the Morrison murder was clearly gone now. He was depressed and sinking deeper into an emotional crisis. From the time he was burned as a child, he had always feared fire, heat, and small spaces. As the prisoners talked more and more about the details of the Evans’s execution and Wayne Ritter’s impending execution, Myers became more and more distraught.

On the night of the Ritter execution, Myers was in full crisis, sobbing in his cell. There is a tradition on death row in Alabama that, at the time scheduled for the execution, the condemned prisoners bang on their cell doors with cups in protest. At midnight, while all the other prisoners banged away, Myers curled up on the floor in the corner of his cell, hyperventilating and flinching with each clang he heard. When the stench of burned flesh that many on the row claimed they could smell during the execution wafted into his cell, Myers dissolved. He called Tate the next morning and told him that he would say whatever he wanted if he would get him off death row.

Tate initially justified keeping Myers and McMillian on death row for safety reasons. But Tate immediately picked Myers up and brought him back to the county jail the day after the Ritter execution. Tate didn’t appear to discuss with anyone the decision to move Myers off death row. Ordinarily, the Alabama Department of Corrections couldn’t just put people on death row or let them off without court orders or legal filings—and certainly no prison warden could do so on his own. But nothing about the prosecution of Walter McMillian was turning out to be ordinary.

Once removed from death row and back in Monroe County, Myers affirmed his initial accusations against McMillian. With Myers back as the primary witness and Bill Hooks ready to say that he saw Walter’s truck at the crime scene, the district attorney believed that he could proceed against McMillian. The case was scheduled for trial in February 1988.

Ted Pearson had been the district attorney for nearly twenty years. He and his family had lived in South Alabama for generations. He knew the local customs, values, and traditions well and had put them to good use in the courtroom. He was getting older and had plans to retire soon, but he hated that his office had been criticized for failing to solve the Morrison murder more quickly. Pearson was determined to leave office with a victory and likely saw the prosecution of Walter McMillian as one of the most important cases of his career.

In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, even though there are sixteen majority-black counties in the state. When African Americans began to exercise their right to vote in the 1970s, there was deep concern among some prosecutors and judges about how the racial demographics in some counties would complicate their reelections. Legislators had aligned counties to maintain white majorities for judicial circuits that included a majority-black county. Still, Pearson had to be more mindful of the concerns of black residents than at the beginning of his career—even if that mindfulness didn’t translate into any substantive changes during his tenure.

Like Tate, Pearson had heard from many black residents that they believed Walter McMillian was innocent. But Pearson was confident he could win a guilty verdict despite the suspect testimony of Ralph Myers and Bill Hooks and the strong doubts in the black community. His one lingering concern may have been a recent United States Supreme Court case that threatened a longstanding feature of high-profile criminal trials in the South: the all-white jury.

When a serious felony case went to trial in a county like Monroe County, which was 40 percent black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African Americans from jury service. In fact, twenty years after the civil rights revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal requirements of racial integration and diversity. As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all-white for decades afterward. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case. In Deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law. Local jury commissions used statutory requirements that jurors be “intelligent and upright” to exclude African Americans and women.

In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional, which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors (if not selected). The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries—it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender.

For many African Americans, the use of wholly discretionary peremptory strikes to select a jury of twelve remained a serious barrier to serving on a jury. In the mid-1960s, the Court held that using peremptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner was unconstitutional, but the justices created an evidentiary standard for proving racial bias that was so high that no one had successfully challenged peremptory strikes in twenty years. The practice of striking all or almost all African American potential jurors continued virtually unchanged after the Court’s ruling.

So defendants like Walter McMillian, even in counties that were 40 or 50 percent black, frequently found themselves staring at all-white juries, especially in death penalty cases. Then, in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that prosecutors could be challenged more directly about using peremptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner, giving hope to black defendants—and forcing prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude black jurors.

Walter was learning some of this history as the months passed. Everyone on death row wanted to advise him, and everyone had a story to tell. The novelty of a pretrial capital defendant on death row seemed to motivate other prisoners to get in Walter’s ear every day. Walter tried to listen politely, but he’d already decided to leave the lawyering to his lawyers. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t very concerned about what he was hearing from folks on the row, especially about race and the kind of jury he would get.

Nearly everyone on death row had been tried by an all-white or nearly all-white jury. Death row prisoner Jesse Morrison told Walter that his prosecutor in Barbour County had used twenty-one out of twenty-two peremptory strikes to exclude all the black people in the jury pool. Vernon Madison from Mobile said that the prosecutor struck all ten black people qualified for jury service in his case. Willie Tabb from Lamar County, Willie Williams from Houston County, Claude Raines from Jefferson County, Gregory Acres from Montgomery County, and Neil Owens from Russell County were among the many black men on death row who had been tried by all-white juries after prosecutors struck all of the African American prospective jurors. Earl McGahee was tried by an all-white jury in Dallas County, even though the county is 60 percent African American. In Albert Jefferson’s case, the prosecutor had organized the list of prospective jurors summoned to court into four groups of roughly twenty-five people each, identified as “strong,” “medium,” “weak,” and “black.” All twenty-six black people in the jury pool could be found on the “black” list, and the prosecutors excluded them all. Joe Duncan, Grady Bankhead, and Colon Guthrie were among some of the white condemned prisoners who told a similar story.

District attorney Ted Pearson had to be concerned about the new Batson decision; he knew veteran civil rights lawyers like Chestnut and Boynton would not hesitate to object to racially discriminatory jury selection, even though he wasn’t too worried about Judge Robert E. Lee Key taking those objections seriously. But the extraordinary publicity surrounding the Morrison murder gave Pearson another idea.

In high-profile cases, it’s fairly standard for defense lawyers to file a motion to change venue—to move the case from the county where the crime took place to a different county where there is less pretrial publicity and sentiment to convict. The motions are almost never granted, but every now and then an appellate court finds that the atmosphere in a county had been so prejudicial that the trial should have been moved. In Alabama, asking to change venue was an essentially futile act. Alabama courts had almost never reversed a conviction because the trial judge had refused to change venue.

When the court scheduled a hearing in October 1987 on pretrial motions in Walter’s case, Chestnut and Boynton showed up with no expectation that any of their motions would be granted. They were more focused on preparing for trial, which was scheduled to begin in February 1988. The pretrial motion hearing was a formality.

Chestnut and Boynton presented their change-of-venue motion. Pearson stood up and said that due to the extraordinary pretrial coverage of the Morrison murder, he agreed that the trial should be moved. Judge Key nodded sympathetically; Chestnut, who knew his way around the Alabama courts, was sure something bad was about to happen. He was also certain the judge and the DA had already conspired.

“The defendant’s motion to change venue is granted,” the judge ruled.

When the judge suggested that it be moved to a neighboring county so that witnesses wouldn’t have far to travel, Chestnut remained hopeful. Almost all of the bordering counties had fairly large African American populations: Wilcox County was 72 percent black; Conecuh was 46 percent black; Clarke County was 45 percent black; Butler 42 percent; Escambia was 32 percent black. Only affluent Baldwin County to the south, with its beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches, was atypical, with an African American population of just 9 percent.

The judge took very little time deciding where the trial should be moved.

“We’ll go to Baldwin County.”

Chestnut and Boynton immediately complained, but the judge reminded them it was their motion. When they sought to withdraw the motion, the judge said he couldn’t authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused. The case would be tried in Bay Minette, the seat of Baldwin County.

The change of venue was disastrous for Walter. Chestnut and Boynton knew there would be very few, if any, black jurors. They also understood that while jurors from Baldwin County might be less personally connected to Ronda Morrison and her family, it was an extremely conservative county that had made even less progress leaving behind the racial politics of Jim Crow than its neighbors.

Given what he’d heard from other death row prisoners about all-white juries, Walter worried about the venue change as well. But he still put his faith in this fact: No one could hear the evidence and believe that he committed this crime. He just didn’t believe that a jury, black or white, could convict him on the nonsensical story told by Ralph Myers—not when he had an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses.

The February trial was postponed. Once again, Ralph Myers was having second thoughts. After months in the county jail, away from death row, Myers again realized he didn’t want to implicate himself in a murder he had not committed. He waited until the morning that the trial was set to begin before he told investigators that he could not testify because what they wanted him to say was not true. He tried to wrangle for more favorable treatment but decided that there was no punishment he was willing to accept for a murder he hadn’t committed.

Myers’s refusal to cooperate got him sent back to death row. Back at Holman, it wasn’t long before he again showed serious emotional and psychological distress. After a couple of weeks, prison officials were so concerned that they sent him to the state hospital for the mentally ill. The Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility in Tuscaloosa did all of the diagnostic and assessment work for courts managing people accused of crimes who might be incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness. It had frequently been criticized by defense lawyers for almost never finding serious mental disabilities that would prevent defendants from going to trial.

Myers’s time at Taylor Hardin did very little to change his predicament. He hoped that he might be returned to the county jail after his thirty-day stint at the hospital, but instead he was returned to death row. Realizing he could not escape the situation he’d created for himself, Myers told investigators he was ready to testify against McMillian.

A new trial date was scheduled for August 1988. Walter had been on death row for over a year. As hard as he had tried to adjust, he couldn’t accept the nightmare his life had become. Although he was nervous, he had been convinced that he was going home back in February, when the first trial was scheduled. His lawyers seemed happy that Myers was struggling and told Walter it was a good sign when the trial was continued because Myers refused to testify. But it meant another six months on death row for Walter, and he couldn’t see anything encouraging about that. When they finally moved him to the Baldwin County Jail in Bay Minette for the August trial, Walter left death row confident he’d never return. He had become friends with several men on the row and was surprised by how conflicted he felt about leaving them, knowing what they would soon face. Yet when they called his name to the transfer office, he lost no time gathering his things and getting in the van to leave.

A week later, Walter sat in the van with shackles pinching his ankles and chains tightly wound around his waist. He could feel his feet beginning to swell because the circulation was cut off by the metal digging into his skin. The handcuffs were too tight, and he was becoming uncharacteristically angry.

“Why you got these chains on me this tight?”

The two Baldwin County deputies who had picked him up a week earlier had not been friendly on the trip from death row to the courthouse. Now that he had been convicted of capital murder, they were downright hostile. One seemed to laugh in response to Walter’s question.

“Them chains is the same as they were when we picked you up. They just feel tighter because we got you now.”

“You need to loosen this, man, I can’t ride like this.”

“It ain’t going to happen, so you should get your mind off it.”

Walter suddenly recognized the man. At the end of the trial when the jury had found Walter guilty, his family and several of the black people who had attended the trial were in shocked disbelief. Sheriff Tate claimed that Walter’s twenty-four-year-old son, Johnny, said, “Somebody’s going to pay for what they’ve done to my father.” Tate asked deputies to arrest Johnny, and there was a scuffle. Walter saw the officers wrestle his child to the ground and place him in handcuffs. The more he looked at the two deputies driving him back to death row, the more convinced he became that one of them had tackled his son.

The van began to move. They wouldn’t tell Walter where he was going, but as soon as they got on the road it was clear that they were taking him back to death row. He had been upset and distraught on the day of his arrest, but he was so sure he’d be released soon. He got frustrated when the days turned into weeks at the county jail. He was depressed and terrified when they took him to death row before trial before being convicted of any crime, and the weeks became months. But when the nearly all-white jury pronounced him guilty, after fifteen months of waiting for vindication, he was shocked, paralyzed. Now he felt himself coming back to life—but all he could feel was seething anger. The deputies were driving him back to death row and talking about a gun show they were planning to attend. Walter realized that he had been foolish to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. He knew Tate was vicious and no good, but he assumed that the others were just doing what they had been told. Now he was feeling something that could only be described as rage.

“Hey, I’m going to sue all of y’all!”

He knew he was screaming and that it wasn’t going to make any difference. “I’m going to sue all of y’all!” he repeated. The officers paid him no attention.

“Loose these chains. Loose these chains.”

He couldn’t remember when he’d last lost control, but he felt himself falling apart. With some struggle he became silent. Thoughts of the trial flew back into his mind. It had been short, methodical, and clinical. Jury selection lasted just a few hours. Pearson used his peremptory strikes to exclude all but one of the handful of African Americans who had been summoned to serve on the jury. His lawyers objected, but the judge summarily dismissed their complaints. The State put Myers on the stand to tell his absurd story about Walter forcing him to drive to Jackson Cleaners because his arm hurt. This version had Myers going into the cleaners where he saw Walter standing over the dead body of Ronda Morrison. Bizarrely, he also claimed that a third person was present and involved in the murder, a mysterious white man with salt and pepper hair who was clearly in charge of the crime and who directed Walter to kill Myers too, but Walter couldn’t because he was out of bullets. Walter thought the testimony was so nonsensical he couldn’t believe that people were taking it seriously. Why wasn’t everyone laughing?

Chestnut’s cross-examination of Myers made it clear that the witness was lying. When Chestnut finished, Walter was sure that the State would simply announce that they had made a mistake. Instead, the prosecutor brought Myers back up to repeat his accusations as if the logic and contradictions in the testimony were completely irrelevant, as if repeating his lies enough times in this quiet room would make them true.

Bill Hooks testified that he’d seen Walter’s truck pull out of the cleaners at the time of the murder and that he recognized the truck because it had been modified as a “low-rider.” Walter instantly whispered to his lawyers that he hadn’t turned his truck into a “low-rider” until several months after Morrison was murdered. His lawyers didn’t do much with that information, which frustrated Walter. Then another white man Walter had never heard of, Joe Hightower, took the stand and said that he had seen the truck at the cleaners, too.

There were a dozen people who could talk about the fish fry and insist that Walter was at home when Ronda Morrison was killed. His lawyers called only three of them. Everybody seemed to be rushing to get the trial over with, and Walter couldn’t understand it. The State then called a white man, Ernest Welch, who said he was the “furniture man” who collected money at the McMillian house on the day they were having a fish fry—but it wasn’t the same day that Ronda Morrison was murdered. He said he remembered better than anyone when she was murdered because he was her uncle. He said that he had been so devastated that he went to the McMillian residence to collect money on a different day.

The lawyers made their arguments, the jury retired, and less than three hours later they filed back into the courtroom. Stone-faced, one by one, they pronounced Walter McMillian guilty.