Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Page 6

  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 appar
ently 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 the
ir 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.