Just Mercy (30 page)

Based on this recent experience, I thought we could win relief for McMillian on appeal. Even if the court was unwilling to rule that Walter was innocent and should be released, the withholding of exculpatory evidence was extreme enough that the court would have a hard time avoiding the case law requiring a new trial. Nothing could be assured, but I explained to Walter that we were only just now getting to a court where our claims would be seriously considered.

Michael had stayed long past the two years he had committed to us, but he was now scheduled to move to San Diego to start a job as a federal public defender. He agonized about leaving our office, although he was less conflicted about leaving Alabama.

I assigned one of our new attorneys, Bernard Harcourt, to replace Michael on Walter’s case. Bernard was a lot like Michael in that he was smart, determined, and extremely hardworking. He had first worked with me when he was a law student at Harvard Law School. He became so engaged in the work that he asked the federal judge he was clerking for after law school if he could cut short his two-year clerkship to join us in Alabama. The judge agreed, and Bernard arrived shortly before Michael left. Raised in New York City by French parents, he had attended the Lycée Français de New York in Manhattan, a high school that was unapologetic about its European perspective on education. After graduating from Princeton, Bernard worked in banking before pursuing his law degree. He had been preparing for a traditional
legal career until he came down to work with us one summer and became fascinated by the issues that death penalty cases presented. He and his girlfriend, Mia, moved to Montgomery and were intrigued by life in Alabama. Bernard’s quick immersion in the McMillian case intensified his cultural adventure more than he could have ever imagined.

The community’s presence at the hearing got people talking about what we had presented in court, and that encouraged more people to come forward with helpful information. All sorts of people were contacting us with wide-ranging claims of corruption and misconduct. Only a few things here and there were useful to us in our efforts to free Walter, but all of it was interesting. Bernard and I continued to track leads and interview people who had insights to share about life in Monroe County.

The threats we received made me worry about the hostility that Walter would face if he was ever released. I wondered how safely he could live in the community if everyone was persuaded that he was a dangerous murderer. We began discussing the idea of reaching out to a few people who might help us publicly dramatize the injustice of Mr. McMillian’s wrongful conviction as a way of setting the stage for his possible release. If the public could only know what we knew, it might ease his re-entry into freedom. We wanted people to understand this simple fact:
Walter did not commit that murder
. His freedom wouldn’t be based on some tricky legal loophole or the exploitation of a technicality. It would be based on simple justice—he was an innocent man.

On the other hand, I didn’t think media attention would help win the case now pending in the Court of Criminal Appeals. In fact, the chief judge on the court, John Patterson, had famously sued
The New York Times
over their coverage of the Civil Rights Movement when he was Alabama’s governor. It was a common tactic used by Southern politicians during civil rights protests: Sue national media outlets for defamation if they provide sympathetic coverage of activists or if they characterize Southern politicians and law enforcement officers unfavorably.
Southern state court judges and all-white juries were all too willing to rule in favor of “defamed” local officials, and state authorities had won millions of dollars in judgments this way. More important, the defamation lawsuits chilled sympathetic coverage of civil rights activism.

In 1960,
The New York Times
printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a landmark ruling,
New York Times v. Sullivan
changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism. But in the South it generated even more contempt for the national press, and that animosity has lingered beyond the Civil Rights Era. I had no doubt that national press coverage of Walter’s case would not help our cause at the Court of Criminal Appeals.

But I did think getting a more informed view of Walter’s conviction and the murder would make his life after release less dangerous—assuming we could ever get his conviction overturned. We felt that we had to take our chances and get the story out. I was concerned about the inability of people in the local community to get a fair picture of what was going on. Aside from the hostility we feared he would face if Walter was released, we were worried about what would happen if a new trial was ordered. All of the prejudicial media coverage would make a fair trial nearly impossible. The local press in Monroe County and Mobile had demonized Walter and had defiantly maintained that his conviction was reliable and his execution necessary.

Local papers had painted Walter as a dangerous drug dealer who
had possibly murdered several innocent teenagers. Monroeville and Mobile newspapers freely printed assertions that Walter was a “drug kingpin,” a “sexual predator,” and a “gang leader.”
When he was first arrested, local headlines emphasized the absurd sexual misconduct charges involving Ralph Myers. “McMillian Charged with Sodomy” was a common headline. In covering the hearings, the
Monroe Journal
focused on the danger Walter posed: “
Those entering the courtroom had to pass through a metal detector, as has been the case throughout the court proceedings against McMillian, and officers were stationed throughout the courtroom.”
Despite all of the evidence presented at our hearing showing that Walter had nothing to do with the Pittman murder, the local press invoked the case to scare up more fear about Walter. “
Convicted Slayer Wanted in East Brewton Murder” was an early headline in the Brewton paper. “Ronda Wasn’t the Only Girl Killed” was the headline in the
Mobile Press Register
after our hearing. The Mobile paper reported after the hearing: “
Myers and McMillian were part of a burglary, theft, forgery and drug smuggling ring that operated in several counties in South Alabama, according to law enforcement officers. McMillian was the leader of the operation.” From its focus on his pretrial placement on death row to the extra security surrounding his court appearances, the narrative in the press was clear: This man was extremely dangerous.

At this point, people seemed uninterested in the truth surrounding the crime. During the most recent hearing in Baldwin County, the State’s local supporters walked out of the courtroom rather than hear the evidence that supported Walter’s innocence. It was risky, but we hoped that national press coverage of our side of the story would change the narrative.

A
Washington Post
journalist, Walt Harrington, had come to Alabama to do a piece on our work a year earlier and had heard me describe the McMillian case. He passed that information to a journalist friend of his, Pete Earley, who contacted me and became immediately interested. After reading the transcripts and files we provided him, he jumped into the case, spent time with several of the players, and
quickly came to share our astonishment that Walter had been convicted on such unreliable evidence.

I’d given a speech at Yale Law School earlier in the year that was attended by a producer from the popular CBS investigative program
60 Minutes
, and he also called me. We’d gotten calls from various news magazine programs over the previous few years that expressed interest in covering our work, but I was wary. My general attitude was that press coverage rarely helped our clients. Beyond the general anti-media sentiments in the South, the death penalty was particularly polarizing. It’s such a politically charged topic that even sympathetic pieces about people on death row usually triggered a local backlash that created more problems for the client and the case. Even though the clients sometimes wanted press attention, I was extremely resistant to media interviews about pending cases. I knew of too many cases where a favorable profile in the media had provoked an expedited execution date or retaliatory mistreatment that made things much worse.

We filed our appeal in the Court of Criminal Appeals that summer. With no small amount of lingering uncertainty, I decided to move forward with the
60 Minutes
piece. Veteran reporter Ed Bradley and his producer David Gelber came down from New York City to Monroeville on a 100-degree day in July and interviewed many of the people whose testimony we’d presented at our hearing. They spoke with Walter, Ralph Myers, Karen Kelly, Darnell Houston, Clay Kast, Jimmy Williams, Walter’s family, and Woodrow Ikner. They confronted Bill Hooks at his job and conducted an extensive interview with Tommy Chapman. Word got around quickly that news celebrity Ed Bradley was in town, upsetting local officials. The
Monroe Journal
wrote:

Even before
the piece was broadcast, the local media seemed to be urging the community to distrust anything they heard reported about the case. In “CBS Examines Murder Case,” a local reporter for the
Monroe Journal
wrote, “Monroe County District Attorney Tommy Chapman said he believes researchers for the CBS television newsmagazine program
60 Minutes
had their minds made up before ever coming here.” Chapman had taken to using a photo of Walter obtained at the time of his arrest that showed him with long bushy hair and a beard, which Chapman thought made it clear that he was a dangerous criminal. “The person they interviewed at Holman prison is not the same person arrested by Sheriff Tate for this murder,” Chapman explained. The
Journal
added that Chapman offered CBS the photograph of the “real” McMillian taken at the time of his arrest, but they were “not interested.” Prisoners in Alabama are required to remain clean-shaven, so of course Walter looked different when interviewed on camera.

When the
60 Minutes
piece aired months later, local officials were quick to discredit it. The
Mobile Press Register
headline was “DA: TV Account of McMillian’s Conviction a ‘Disgrace’ ”; the article quoted Chapman: “For them to hold themselves up as a reputable news show is beyond belief, and irresponsible.” The publicity was characterized as further injuring Ronda Morrison’s parents.
The local writers complained that the Morrisons had to worry and deal with the stress that new publicity “could lead many people to think McMillian is innocent.”

The local media were eager to join the prosecutors in criticizing the
60 Minutes
piece because it implicated their coverage, which had largely presented only the prosecution’s theory and characterization of Walter and the crime. But people in the community watched
60 Minutes
all the time and generally trusted it. Despite the local media reaction, the CBS coverage gave the community a summary of the evidence we’d presented in court and created questions and doubts about Walter’s guilt. Some influential community leaders also thought
it made Monroeville look backward and possibly racist in a way that was not good for the community’s image or efforts at recruiting business, and business leaders started asking tough questions of Chapman and law enforcement about what was going on in the case.

People in the black community were thrilled to see honest coverage of the case. They had been whispering about Walter’s wrongful conviction for years. The case had so traumatized the black community that many had become preoccupied with each court development and ruling. We frequently got calls from people simply seeking an update. Some callers sought clarification of a particular point in the case that had been the subject of serious debate in a barbershop or at a social gathering. For many black people in the region, watching the evidence that we had presented in court now laid out on national television was therapeutic.

In the
60 Minutes
interview with Chapman, he dismissed as silly the suggestion of any racial bias in Walter McMillian’s prosecution. He calmly professed his complete confidence and certainty that McMillian was guilty and that he should be executed as soon as possible. He expressed contempt for Walter’s attorneys and “people who try to second-guess juries.”

We later found out that privately, despite the confidence expressed in his statements to local media and to
60 Minutes
, Chapman had begun to worry about the reliability of the evidence against Walter. He couldn’t ignore the problems in the case that had been exposed at the hearing. Given our success in other death penalty cases, he must have feared the very real possibility of the appellate court’s overturning Walter’s conviction. Chapman had become the public face defending the conviction, and he realized that he’d put his own credibility on the line by relying on the work of local investigators—work that was now revealed as almost farcically flawed.

Chapman called Tate, Ikner, and Benson together shortly after the hearing and expressed his concerns. When he asked the local investigators to explain the contradictory evidence we had presented, he
wasn’t impressed with what he heard. Not long after that, he formally asked ABI officials in Montgomery to conduct another investigation into the murder to confirm Mr. McMillian’s guilt.