Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

  People in Monroe County began to whisper about the incompetence of the police. When there were still no arrests several months later, the whispers became louder, and public criticisms of the police, sheriff, and local prosecutor were aired in the local newspaper and on local radio stations. Tom Tate was elected the new county sheriff days after the murder took place, and folks started to question whether he was up to the job. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) was called in to investigate the murder but achieved no more success solving the crime than local officials had. People in Monroeville became anxious. Local businesses posted rewards offering thousands of dollars for information leading to an arrest. Gun sales, which were always robust, increased.

  Meanwhile, Walter was wrestling with his own problems. He had been trying for weeks to end his relationship with Karen Kelly. The child custody proceedings and public scandal had taken a toll on her; she had started using drugs and seemed to fall apart. She began to associate with Ralph Myers, a white man with a badly disfigured face and lengthy criminal record who seemed to perfectly embody her fall from grace. Ralph was an unusual partner for Karen, but she was in such serious decline that nothing she did made any sense to her friends and family. The relationship brought Karen to rock bottom, beyond scandal and drug use into serious criminal behavior. Together they became involved in dealing drugs and were implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman, a young woman from neighboring Escambia County.

  Police had quick success in investigating the Pittman murder, rapidly concluding that Ralph Myers had been involved. When the police interrogated Ralph, they encountered a man as psychologically complicated as he was physically scarred. He was emotional and frail, and he craved attention—his only effective defense was his skill in manipulation and misdirection. Ralph believed that everything he said had to be epic, shocking, and elaborate. As a child living in foster care, he had been horribly burned in a fire. The burns so scarred and disfigured his face and neck that he needed multiple surgeries to regain basic functioning. He became quite used to strangers staring at his scars with pained expressions on their faces. He was a tragic outcast who lived on the margins, but he tried to compensate by pretending to have inside knowledge about all sorts of mysteries.

  After initially denying any direct involvement in the Pittman murder, Myers conceded that he may have played some accidental role but quickly put the blame for the murder itself on more interesting local figures. He first accused a black man with a bad reputation named Isaac Dailey, but the police quickly discovered that Dailey had been in a jail cell on the night of the murder. Myers then confessed that he had made up the story because the true killer was none other than the elected sheriff of a nearby county.

  As outrageous as the claim was, ABI agents appeared to take it seriously. They asked him more questions, but the more Myers talked, the less credible his story sounded. Officials began to suspect that Myers was the sole killer and was desperately trying to implicate others to minimize his culpability.

  While the death of Vickie Pittman was news, it failed to compare with the continuing mystery surrounding the death of Ronda Morrison. Vickie came from a poor white family, several of whose members were incarcerated; she enjoyed none of the status of Ronda Morrison. The Morrison murder remained the focus of everyone’s attention for months.

  Ralph Myers was illiterate, but he knew that it was the Morrison crime that was preoccupying law enforcement investigators. When his allegations against the sheriff didn’t seem to be going anywhere, he changed his story again and told investigators that he had been involved in the murder of Vickie Pittman along with Karen Kelly and her black boyfriend, Walter McMillian. But that wasn’t all. He also told police that McMillian was responsible for the murder of Ronda Morrison. That assertion attracted the full attention of law enforcement officials.

  It soon became apparent that Walter McMillian had never met Ralph Myers, let alone committed two murders with him. To prove that the two of them were in cahoots, an ABI agent asked Myers to meet Walter McMillian at a store while agents monitored the interaction. It had been several months since Ronda Morrison’s murder.

  Once Myers entered the store, he was not able to identify Walter McMillian among several black men present (he had to ask the owner of the store to point McMillian out). He then delivered a note to McMillian, purportedly written by Karen Kelly. According to witnesses, Walter seemed confused both by Myers, a man he had never seen before, and the note itself. Walter threw the note away and went back to what he was doing. He paid little attention to the whole odd encounter.

  The monitoring ABI agents were left with nothing to suggest any relationship between Myers and McMillian and plenty of evidence indicating that the two men had never met. Still, they persisted with the McMillian theory. Time was passing—seven months, by this time—and the community was fearful and angry. Criticism was mounting. They desperately needed an arrest.

  Monroe County Sheriff Tom Tate did not have much law enforcement experience. By his own description he was “very local” and took great pride in never having ventured too far from Monroeville. Now, four months into his term as sheriff, he faced a seemingly unsolvable murder and intense public pressure. When Myers told police about McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly, it’s likely that the infamous interracial affair was already well known to Tate as a result of the Kelly custody hearings that had generated so much gossip. But there was no evidence against McMillian—no evidence except that he was an African American man involved in an adulterous interracial affair, which meant he was reckless and possibly dangerous, even if he had no prior criminal history and a good reputation. Maybe that was evidence enough.

  * * *

  * Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.

  Chapter Two

  Stand

  After spending the first year and a half of my legal career sleeping on Steve Bright’s living room couch in Atlanta, it was time to find an apartment of my own. When I’d started working in Atlanta, staff were scrambling to handle one crisis after another. I was immediately thrown into litigation with pressing deadlines and didn’t have time to find a place to live—and my $14,000 annual salary didn’t leave me with much money for rent—so Steve kindly took me in. Living in Steve’s small Grant Park duplex allowed me to question him nonstop about the complex issues and challenges our cases and clients presented. Each day we dissected big and small issues from morning until midnight. I loved it. But when a law school classmate, Charles Bliss, moved to Atlanta for a job with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, we realized that if we pooled our meager salaries, we could afford a low-rent apartment. Charlie and I had started at Harvard Law School together and had lived in the same dorm as first-year students. He was a white kid from North Carolina who seemed to share my confusion about what we were experiencing during law school. We frequently retreated to the school gym to play basketball and to try to make sense of things.

  Charlie and I found a place near Atlanta’s Inman Park. After a year, a rent increase forced us to move to the Virginia Highlands section of the city, where we stayed for a year before another rent increase sent us to Midtown Atlanta. The two-bedroom apartment we shared in Midtown was the nicest place in the nicest neighborhood we’d yet found. Because of my growing caseload in Alabama, I didn’t get to spend much time there.

  My plan for a new law project to represent people on death row in Alabama was starting to take shape. My hope was to get the project off the ground in Alabama and eventually return to Atlanta to live. My docket of new death penalty cases in Alabama meant I was wor
king insane hours driving back and forth from Atlanta and simultaneously trying to resolve several prison condition cases I had filed in various Southern states.

  Conditions of confinement for prisoners were getting worse everywhere. In the 1970s, the Attica Prison riots drew national attention to horrible prison abuses. The takeover of Attica by inmates allowed the country to learn about cruel practices within prisons such as solitary confinement, where inmates are isolated in a small confined space for weeks or months. Prisoners in some facilities would be placed in a “sweatbox,” a casket-sized hole or a box situated where the inmate would be forced to endure extreme heat for days or weeks. Some prisoners were tortured with electric cattle prods as punishment for violations of the prison’s rule. Inmates at some facilities would be chained to “hitching posts,” their arms fastened above their heads in a painful position where they’d be forced to stand for hours. The practice, which wasn’t declared unconstitutional until 2002, was one of many degrading and dangerous punishments imposed on incarcerated people. Terrible food and living conditions were widespread.

  The death of forty-two people at the end of the Attica standoff exposed the danger of prison abuse and inhumane conditions. The increased attention also led to several Supreme Court rulings that provided basic due process protections for imprisoned people. Wary of potential violence, several states implemented reforms to eliminate the most abusive practices. But a decade later, the rapidly growing prison population inevitably led to a deterioration in the conditions of confinement.

  We were getting scores of letters from prisoners who continued to complain about horrible conditions. Prisoners reported that they were still being beaten by correctional staff and subjected to humiliation in stockades and other degrading punishments. An alarming number of cases came to our office involving prisoners who had been found dead in their cells.

  I was working on several of these cases, including one in Gadsden, Alabama, where jail officials claimed that a thirty-nine-year-old black man had died of natural causes after being arrested for traffic violations. His family maintained that he was beaten by police and jail officials who then denied him his asthma inhaler and medication despite his begging for it. I’d spent a lot of time with the grief-stricken family of Lourida Ruffin and heard what an affectionate father he had been, how kind he had been, and how people had assumed things about him that weren’t true. At six feet five inches tall and over 250 pounds, he could seem a little intimidating, but his wife and mother insisted that he was sweet and gentle.

  Gadsden police had stopped Mr. Ruffin one night because they said his car was swerving. Police discovered that his license had expired a few weeks earlier, so he was taken into custody. When he arrived at the city jail badly bruised and bleeding, Mr. Ruffin told the other inmates that he had been beaten terribly and was desperately in need of his inhaler and asthma medication. When I started investigating the case, inmates at the jail told me they saw officers beating Mr. Ruffin before taking him to an isolation cell. Several hours later they saw medical personnel remove his body from the cell on a gurney.

  Despite the reforms of the 1970s and early 1980s, inmate death in jails and prisons was still a serious problem. Suicide, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, inadequate medical care, staff abuse, and guard violence claimed the lives of hundreds of prisoners every year.

  I soon received other complaints from people in the Gadsden community. The parents of a black teenager who had been shot and killed by police told me that their son had been stopped for a minor traffic violation after running a red light. Their young son had just started driving and became very nervous when the police officer approached him. His family maintained that he reached down to the floor where he kept his gym bag to retrieve his newly issued driver’s license. The police claimed he was reaching for a weapon—no weapon was ever found—and the teen was shot dead while he sat in his car. The officer who shot the boy said that the teen had been menacing and had moved quickly, in a threatening manner. The child’s parents told me their son was generally nervous and easily frightened but was also obedient and would never have hurt anyone. He was very religious and a good student, and he had the kind of reputation that allowed the family to persuade civil rights leaders to push for an investigation into his death. Their pleas reached our office, and I was looking into the case along with the jail and prison cases.

  Figuring out Alabama civil and criminal law while managing death penalty cases in several other states kept me very busy. The additional prison conditions litigation meant a lot of long-distance driving and extremely long hours. My weathered 1975 Honda Civic was struggling to keep up. The radio had stopped working consistently a year earlier; it would come to life only if I hit a pothole or stopped suddenly enough to violently shake the car and spark a connection.

  After making the three-hour drive back from Gadsden earlier in the day and heading straight to the office, it was once again approaching midnight as I left the office for home. I got in my car, and to my delight the radio came on as soon as I turned the ignition. In just over three years of law practice I had become one of those people for whom such small events could make a big difference in my joy quotient. On this late night, not only was my radio working but the station was also hosting a retrospective on the music of Sly and the Family Stone. I’d grown up listening to Sly and found myself rolling joyfully through the streets of Atlanta to tunes like “Dance to the Music,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and “Family Affair.”

  Our Midtown Atlanta apartment was on a dense residential street. Some nights I had to park halfway down the block or even around the corner to find a space. But tonight I was lucky: I parked my rattling Civic just steps from our new front door just as Sly was starting “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” It was late, and I needed to get to bed, but the moment was too good to let pass, so I remained in the car listening to the music. Each time a tune ended I told myself to go inside, but then another irresistible song would begin, and I would find myself unable to leave. I was singing along to “Stand!” the soaring Sly anthem with the great gospel-themed ending, when I saw a flashing police light approaching. I was parked a few doors up from our apartment, so I assumed that the officers would drive by in pursuit of some urgent mission. When they came to a stop twenty feet in front of me, I wondered what was going on.

  Our section of the street only ran one way. My parked car was facing in the proper direction; the police car had come down the street in the wrong direction. I noticed for the first time that it wasn’t an ordinary police cruiser but one of the special Atlanta SWAT cars. The officers had a spotlight attached to their vehicle, and they directed it at me sitting in my car. Only then did it occur to me that they might be there for me, but I couldn’t imagine why. I had been parked on the street for about fifteen minutes listening to Sly. Only one of my car speakers worked and not very well. I knew the music couldn’t be heard outside the car.

  The officers sat there with their light pointed at me for a minute or so. I turned off the radio before “Stand!” was over. I had case files on my car seat about Lourida Ruffin and the young man who had been shot in Gadsden. Eventually two police officers got out of their vehicle. I noticed immediately that they weren’t wearing the standard Atlanta police uniform. Instead they were ominously dressed in military style, black boots with black pants and vests.

  I decided to get out of my car and go home. Even though they were intensely staring at me in my car, I was still hoping that they were in the area for something unrelated to me. Or if they were concerned that something was wrong with me, I figured I would let them know that everything was okay. It certainly never occurred to me that getting out of my car was wrong or dangerous.

  As soon as I opened my car door and got out, the police officer who had started walking toward my vehicle drew his weapon and pointed it at me. I must have looked completely bewildered.

  My first instinct was to run. I quickly decided that wouldn’t be smart. Then I thought for an instant
that maybe these weren’t real police officers.

  “Move and I’ll blow your head off!” The officer shouted the words, but I couldn’t make any sense of what he meant. I tried to stay calm; it was the first time in my life anyone had ever pointed a gun at me.

  “Put your hands up!” The officer was a white man about my height. In the darkness I could only make out his black uniform and his pointed weapon.

  I put my hands up and noticed that he seemed nervous. I don’t remember deciding to speak, I just remember the words coming out: “It’s all right. It’s okay.”

  I’m sure I sounded afraid because I was terrified.

  I kept saying the words over and over again. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Finally I said, “I live here, this is my apartment.”

  I looked at the officer who was pointing the gun at my head less than fifteen feet away. I thought I saw his hands shaking.

  I kept saying as calmly as I could: “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  The second officer, who had not drawn his weapon, inched cautiously toward me. He stepped on the sidewalk, circled behind my parked car, and came up behind me while the other officer continued to point the gun at me. He grabbed me by the arms and pushed me up against the back of my car. The other officer then lowered his weapon.

  “What are you doing out here?” said the second officer, who seemed older than the one who had drawn his weapon. He sounded angry.

  “I live here. I moved into that house down the street just a few months ago. My roommate is inside. You can go ask him.” I hated how afraid I sounded and the way my voice was shaking.

  “What are you doing out in the street?”

  “I was just listening to the radio.” He placed my hands on the car and bent me over the back of the vehicle. The SWAT car’s bright spotlight was still focused on me. I noticed people up the block turning on their lights and peering out of their front doors. The house next to ours came to life, and a middle-aged white man and woman walked outside and stared at me as I was leaned over the vehicle.