Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

  At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn’t expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they’d saved for their grandson to help Charlie.

  Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they “loved him instantly.” Charlie’s grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie’s incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn’t like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family.

  At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after his release. “You know, he’s been through a lot. I’m not sure he can just carry on as if nothing has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you’d like him to do.”

  They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative, but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn’t completely accept. She told me, “We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

  The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home when he was released.

  Chapter Seven

  Justice Denied

  Walter’s appeal was denied.

  The seventy-page opinion from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his conviction and death sentence was devastating. I’d filed a lengthy brief that documented the insufficiency of the evidence and raised every legal deficiency in the trial that I could identify. I argued that there was no credible corroboration of Myers’s testimony and that under Alabama law the State couldn’t rely exclusively on the testimony of an accomplice. I argued that there was prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and an improper change of venue. I even challenged Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s override of the jury’s life sentence, though I knew the reduction of an innocent man’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole would still have been an egregious miscarriage of justice. The court rejected all of my arguments.

  I didn’t think it would turn out this way. At the oral argument months earlier, I’d been hopeful as I walked into the imposing Alabama Judicial Building and stood in the grand appellate courtroom that was formerly a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple. Constructed in the 1920s, the building was renovated into a cavernous courthouse in the 1940s, complete with marble floors and an impressive domed ceiling. It stood at the end of Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, across the street from the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away was the state capitol, adorned with three banners: the American flag, the white and red state flag of Alabama, and the battle flag of the Confederacy.

  The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on the second floor. The chief judge of the court was former governor John Patterson. He had made national news in the 1960s as a fierce opponent of civil rights and racial integration. In 1958, with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, he defeated George Wallace for governor. His positions were even more pro-segregation than Wallace’s (who, having learned his lesson, would become the most famous segregationist in America, declaring in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” just a block away from this courthouse). When he was attorney general before becoming governor, Patterson banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama and blocked civil rights boycotts and protests in Tuskegee and Montgomery. As governor, he withheld law enforcement protection for the Freedom Riders—the black and white college students and activists who traveled south in the early 1960s to desegregate public facilities in recognition of new federal laws. When the Freedom Riders’ bus traveled through Alabama, they were abandoned by the police. Alone and unprotected, they were beaten violently, and their bus was bombed.

  Still, I forced myself to be hopeful. That was all long ago. During my argument, the court’s five judges looked at me with curiosity but asked few questions. I chose to interpret their silence as agreement. I hoped they saw so little support for the conviction that they didn’t think there was much to discuss. Judge Patterson’s only remark during the oral argument came at the end, when he slowly but firmly asked a single question that echoed through the mostly empty courtroom.

  “Where are you from?”

  I was thrown by the question and hesitated before answering.

  “I live in Montgomery, sir.”

  I had foolishly discouraged McMillian’s family from attending the oral argument because I knew that the issues were fairly arcane and that there would be very little discussion of the facts. Supporters would have to take off from work and make the long drive to Montgomery for an early morning argument. Since each side had only thirty minutes to present, I hadn’t thought it worth the effort. When I sat down after the argument, I regretted that decision. I would have appreciated some sympathetic faces in the courtroom to signal to the court that this case was different, but there were none.

  An assistant attorney general then presented the State’s arguments—capital cases on appeal were managed by the attorney general, not the local district attorney. The State’s lawyer argued that this was a routine capital murder case and that the death penalty had been appropriately imposed. Following the oral argument, I still had hope that the court would overturn the conviction and sentence because it was so clearly unsupported by reliable facts. State law required credible corroboration of accomplice testimony in a murder case, and there simply wasn’t any in Walter’s case. I believed that the court would have a hard time affirming a conviction with so little evidence. I was wrong.

  I drove to the prison to deliver the news. Walter didn’t say anything as I explained the situation, but he had a strange, despairing look on his face. I had tried to prepare him for the possibility that it could take years to get his conviction overturned, but he had gotten his hopes up.

  “They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” he said glumly. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.”

  “We’re just getting started, Walter,” I replied. “There is a lot more to do, and we??
?re going to make them confront this.”

  I was telling the truth: We did have to press on. Our plan was to ask the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider its decision, and if that turned out to be a dead end, we would seek review in the Alabama Supreme Court. And we had uncovered even more evidence of Walter’s innocence.

  After filing the appeal brief, I’d continued investigating the case intensively. If we hadn’t come up with so much new evidence to prove Walter’s innocence, I think the court’s ruling would have been even more overwhelming. I told Walter before I left the prison, “They don’t know what we now know about your innocence. As soon as we present the new evidence to them, they’ll think differently.” My hopefulness was genuine, in spite of everything that had happened already. But I was underestimating the resistance we would face.

  I’d finally been able to hire some additional lawyers for the organization, which gave me more time to investigate Walter’s case. One of my new hires was Michael O’Connor, a recent Yale Law School graduate with a passion for helping people in trouble that had been kindled by his own struggles earlier in life. The son of Irish immigrants, Michael had grown up outside of Philadelphia in a tough working-class neighborhood. When his high school friends started experimenting with hard drugs, so did Mike, and he soon developed a heroin addiction. His life descended into a nightmare of drug dependency and chaos, complete with the growing risk of death by overdose. For several years he floated from one crisis to another until the overdose death of a close friend motivated him to crawl his way back to sobriety. Throughout all of this heartache, his family had never abandoned him. They helped him stabilize his life and find his way back to college. At Penn State he revealed himself to be a brilliant student, graduating summa cum laude. His academic credentials got him into Yale Law School, but his heart was still connected to all the brokenness his years on the street had shown him.

  When I interviewed him for the job, he was apologetic about the darker episodes in his past, but I thought he was perfect for the kind of staff we were trying to build. He signed up, moved to Montgomery, and without hesitation jumped into the McMillian case with me. We spent days tracking leads, interviewing dozens of people, following wild rumors, investigating different theories. I was increasingly persuaded that we would have to figure out who really had killed Ronda Morrison to win Walter’s release. Aside from my appreciation for Michael’s invaluable help with the work itself, I was grateful finally to have someone around to share the insanity of the case with—just as I was discovering that it was even crazier than I thought.

  After a few months of investigation, we’d uncovered strong evidence to support Walter’s innocence. We discovered that Bill Hooks had been paid by Sheriff Tate for his testimony against Walter—we found checks in the county’s financial records showing close to $5,000 in payments to Hooks in reward money and “expenses.” Sheriff Tate had also paid Hooks money to travel back and forth out of the county around the time of the trial. This information should have been disclosed to Walter’s counsel prior to trial so that they could have used it to cast doubt on the credibility of Hooks’s testimony.

  We also found out that Hooks had been released from jail immediately after giving the police his statement that he’d seen Walter’s “low-rider” truck at the cleaners on the day of the murder. We found court records revealing that the D.A. and the sheriff, who are county officials, had somehow gotten city charges and fines against Hooks dismissed, even though they had no authority in city courts. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that Hooks had charges against him dismissed in exchange for cooperation with authorities was information that the State was obligated to reveal to the defense. But, of course, they hadn’t.

  We found the white man who was running the store on the day that Ralph Myers came in for the purpose of giving a note to Walter. Walter had tried to persuade his original lawyers to speak to this man, but they had failed to do so. After Walter described the location of the store, we were able to track him down. The storeowner recounted his memory of that day: Myers had sought out Walter—but had to ask the storeowner which of the several black men in the store was Walter McMillian. Months after the crime, the storeowner was adamant that Myers had never seen Walter McMillian before.

  In a church basement, Walter’s sister found flyers advertising the fish fry held at Walter’s house; they confirmed that the event had taken place on the same day as the Morrison murder. A white storeowner who had no relationship to Walter or his family had kept a copy of that flyer for some reason, and he confirmed that he had received it before the Morrison murder. We even tracked down Clay Kast, the white mechanic who had modified Walter’s truck and converted it to a low-rider. He confirmed that the work had been done over six months after Ronda Morrison was murdered. This proved that McMillian’s truck had had no modifications or special features and therefore could not have been the truck described by Myers and Hooks at the trial.

  I was feeling very good about the progress we were making when I got a call that would become the most significant break in the case.

  The voice said, “Mr. Stevenson, this is Ralph Myers.”

  Our secretary had told me there was a “Mr. Miles” on the phone, so I was a little shocked to hear Ralph Myers on the other end of the line. Before I could compose myself, he spoke again.

  “I think you need to come and see me. I have something I need to tell you,” he said dramatically.

  Myers was imprisoned at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama, and Michael and I made plans to meet him there in three days.

  Michael and I had started running a few miles at night after work to help us wind down from the increasingly long work days. Montgomery has a beautiful park that houses the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which brings nationally acclaimed playwrights and actors to Alabama to perform Shakespeare and modern theatrical productions. The theater is set among hundreds of acres of beautifully maintained parkland with lakes and ponds. There are several trails for running. That evening we spent most of our run speculating about what Myers would tell us.

  “Why would Myers call us now?” Michael asked. “Can you imagine just going into a courtroom and straight-up making up a story that puts an innocent man on death row? I’m not sure we can trust anything he says.”

  “Well, you may be right, but he had a lot of help in putting together that testimony. Remember, they also put Myers on death row to coerce some of those statements. Who knows? He may be in touch with the State now, and this is some kind of setup where they are trying to mislead us.”

  I hadn’t seriously considered that possibility until our run that night. I thought again about how sleazy Myers had been during the trial. “We have to be careful to not reveal information to Myers—just get information he has. But we have to talk to him because if he recants his trial testimony, the State has nothing on Walter.”

  We agreed that depending on what he had to say, Myers could change everything for us. We had made a lot of progress in disproving the testimony of Bill Hooks; with the appearance of Darnell Houston, the new evidence about the condition of Walter’s truck, and the discovery of the assistance given Hooks by law enforcement, his testimony was now riddled with credibility issues. But getting a recantation from Myers would be a much bigger deal. Myers’s bizarre accusations and testimony were the basis of the State’s entire case.

  Having read Myers’s testimony and reviewed the records that were available about him, I knew that he had a tragic background and a complex personality. Walter and his family had described Myers as pure evil for the lies he had told during the trial. The experience of being so coldly lied about at trial by someone you don’t even know was one of the most disquieting parts of the trial for Walter. When Walter called me at the office the next day, I told him we’d heard from Myers and that we were going to see what he had to say. Walter warned me: “He’s a snake. Be careful.”

  Michael and I drove two hours to the state prison in Springville
, in St. Clair County. The prison is in a rural area northeast of Birmingham, where the Alabama terrain starts to turn rocky and mountainous. The maximum-security prison was more recently built than Holman or Donaldson, the other maximum-security prisons in Alabama, but no one would suggest that St. Clair was modern. Michael and I cleared security at the prison entrance; the guard who patted us down said he’d been working at the prison for three months, and this was the first time he’d had a legal visit during his shift. We were directed down a long corridor that led to a flight of stairs that took us deeper inside the prison. We were admitted through several secure metal doors into the large room that served as the visitation area. It was typical: There were vending machines against the back walls and small rectangular tables where inmates could meet with family members. The familiarity of the setting did little to calm us. Michael and I put our notepads and pens on one of the tables and then paced around the room, waiting for Myers.

  When Myers walked into the visitation area, I was surprised at how old he seemed. His hair was almost completely gray, which made him seem frail and vulnerable. He was also shorter with a much smaller body frame than I was expecting. His testimony had caused so much anguish for Walter and his family that I had created a larger-than-life image of him. He walked toward us but stopped short when he saw Michael and nervously blurted out, “Who is he? You didn’t tell me you were bringing anybody with you.” Myers had a thick Southern accent. Up close, his scars made him appear more sympathetic than menacing or villainous.

  “This is Michael O’Connor. He’s a lawyer in my office working with me on this case. Michael is just helping me investigate this case.”