Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

  The officer holding me asked me for my driver’s license but wouldn’t let me move my arms to retrieve it. I told him that it was in my back pocket, and he fished my wallet out from my pants. The other officer was now leaning inside my car and going through my papers. I knew that he had no probable cause to enter my vehicle and that he was conducting an illegal search. I was about to say something when I saw him open the glove compartment. Opening objects in a parked vehicle was so incredibly illegal that I realized he wasn’t paying any attention to the rules, so saying something about it would be pointless.

  There was nothing interesting in my car. There were no drugs, no alcohol, not even tobacco. I kept a giant-size bag of peanut M&Ms and Bazooka bubble gum in the glove compartment to help stave off hunger when I didn’t have time for a meal. There were just a few M&Ms left in the bag, which the officer inspected carefully. He put his nose into the bag before tossing it back. I wouldn’t be eating those M&Ms.

  I had not lived at our new address long enough to get a new driver’s license, so the address on my license didn’t match the new location. There was no legal requirement to update the driver’s license, but it prompted the officer to hold me there for another ten minutes while he went back to his car to run a search on me. My neighbors grew bolder as the encounter dragged on. Even though it was late, people were coming out of their homes to watch. I could hear them talking about all the burglaries in the neighborhood. There was a particularly vocal older white woman who loudly demanded that I be questioned about items she was missing.

  “Ask him about my radio and my vacuum cleaner!” Another lady asked about her cat who had been absent for three days. I kept waiting for my apartment light to come on and for Charlie to walk outside and help me out. He had been dating a woman who also worked at Legal Aid and had been spending a lot of time at her house. It occurred to me that he might not be home.

  Finally, the officer returned and spoke to his partner: “They don’t have anything on him.” He sounded disappointed.

  I found my nerve and took my hands off the car. “This is so messed up. I live here. You shouldn’t have done this. Why did you do this?”

  The older officer frowned at me. “Someone called about a suspected burglar. There have been a lot of burglaries in this neighborhood.” Then he grinned. “We’re going to let you go. You should be happy,” he said.

  With that, they walked away, got in their SWAT car, and drove off. The neighbors looked me over one last time before retreating back into their homes. I couldn’t decide whether I should race to my door so that they could see that I lived in the neighborhood or wait until they were all gone so that no one would know where the “suspected criminal” lived. I decided to wait.

  I gathered up my papers, which the cop had scattered all over the car and onto the sidewalk. I unhappily threw my M&Ms into a trash can on the street and then walked into my apartment. To my great relief, Charlie was there. I woke him to tell the story.

  “They never even apologized,” I kept saying. Charlie shared my outrage but soon fell back asleep. I couldn’t sleep at all.

  The next morning I told Steve about the incident. He was furious and urged me to file a complaint with the Atlanta Police Department. Some folks in the office said I should explain in my complaint that I was a civil rights attorney working on police misconduct cases. It seemed to me that no one should need those kinds of credentials to complain about misconduct by police officers.

  I started writing my complaint determined not to reveal that I was an attorney. When I replayed the whole incident in my mind, what bothered me most was the moment when the officer drew his weapon and I thought about running. I was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who had worked on police misconduct cases. I had the judgment to speak calmly to the officer when he threatened to shoot me. When I thought about what I would have done when I was sixteen years old or nineteen or even twenty-four, I was scared to realize that I might have run. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became about all the young black boys and men in that neighborhood. Did they know not to run? Did they know to stay calm and say, “It’s okay”?

  I detailed all of my concerns. I found Bureau of Justice statistics reporting that black men were eight times more likely to be killed by the police than whites. By the end of the twentieth century the rate of police shootings would improve so that men of color were “only” four times more likely to be killed by law enforcement, but the problem would get worse as some states passed “Stand Your Ground” laws empowering armed citizens to use lethal force as well.

  I kept writing my memo to the Atlanta Police Department and before I knew it I had typed close to nine pages outlining all the things I thought had gone wrong. For two pages I detailed the completely illegal search of the vehicle and the absence of probable cause. I even cited about a half-dozen cases. I read over the complaint and realized that I had done everything but say, “I’m a lawyer.”

  I filed my complaint with the police department and tried to forget about the incident, but I couldn’t. I kept thinking about what had happened. I began to feel embarrassed that I hadn’t asserted more control during the encounter. I hadn’t told the officers I was a lawyer or informed them that what they were doing was illegal. Should I have said more to them? Despite the work I’d done assisting people on death row, I questioned how prepared I was to do really difficult things. I even started having second thoughts about going to Alabama to start a law office. I couldn’t stop thinking about how at risk young kids are when they get stopped by the police.

  My complaint made it through the review process at the Atlanta Police Department. Every few weeks I’d get a letter explaining that the police officers had done nothing wrong and that police work is very difficult. I appealed these dismissals unsuccessfully up the chain of command. Finally, I requested a meeting with the chief of police and the police officers who had stopped me. This request was denied, but the deputy chief met with me. I had asked for an apology and suggested training to prevent similar incidents. The deputy chief nodded politely as I explained what had happened. When I finished, he apologized to me, but I suspected that he just wanted me to leave. He promised that the officers would be required to do some “extra homework on community relations.” I didn’t feel vindicated.

  My caseload was getting crazy. The lawyers defending the Gadsden City Jail finally acknowledged that Mr. Ruffin’s rights had been violated and that he had been illegally denied his asthma medicine. We won a decent settlement for Mr. Ruffin’s family, so they would at least receive some financial help. I turned the other police misconduct cases over to other lawyers because my death penalty docket was so full.

  I had no time to make war with the Atlanta Police when I had clients facing execution. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how dangerous and unfair the situation was and how I’d done nothing wrong. And what if I had had drugs in my car? I would have been arrested and then would have needed to convince my attorney to believe me when I explained that the police had entered the car illegally. Would I get an attorney who would take such a claim seriously? Would a judge believe that I’d done nothing wrong? Would they believe someone who was just like me but happened not to be a lawyer? Someone like me who was unemployed or had a prior criminal record?

  I decided to talk to youth groups, churches, and community organizations about the challenges posed by the presumption of guilt assigned to the poor and people of color. I spoke at local meetings and tried to sensitize people to the need to insist on accountability from law enforcement. I argued that police could improve public safety without abusing people. Even when I was in Alabama, I made time for talks at community events whenever anyone asked.

  I was in a poor rural county in Alabama after another trip to pull records in a death penalty case when I was invited to speak at a small African American church. Only about two dozen people showed up. One of the community leaders introduced me, and I went to the front of the church and began my talk about the
death penalty, increasing incarceration rates, abuse of power within prisons, discriminatory law enforcement, and the need for reform. At one point, I decided to talk about my encounter with the police in Atlanta, and I realized that I was getting a bit emotional. My voice got shaky, and I had to rein myself in to finish my remarks.

  During the talk, I noticed an older black man in a wheelchair who had come in just before the program started. He was in his seventies and was wearing an old brown suit. His gray hair was cut short with unruly tufts here and there. He looked at me intensely throughout my presentation but showed no emotion or reaction during most of the talk. His focused stare was unnerving. A young boy who was about twelve had wheeled him into the church, probably his grandson or a relative. I noticed that the man occasionally directed the boy to fetch things for him. He would wordlessly nod his head, and the boy seemed to know that the man wanted a fan or a hymnal.

  After I finished speaking, the group sang a hymn to end the session. The older man didn’t sing but simply closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. After the program, people came up to me; most folks were very kind and expressed appreciation for my having taken the time to come and talk to them. Several young black boys walked up to shake my hand. I was pleased that people seemed to value the information I shared. The man in the wheelchair was waiting in the back of the church. He was still staring at me. When everyone else had left, he nodded to the young boy, who quickly wheeled him up to me.

  The man’s expression never changed as he approached me. He stopped in front of me, leaned forward in his wheelchair, and said forcefully, “Do you know what you’re doing?” He looked very serious, and he wasn’t smiling.

  His question threw me. I couldn’t tell what he was really asking or whether he was being hostile. I didn’t know what to say. He then wagged his finger at me, and asked again. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  I tried to smile to diffuse the situation but I was completely baffled. “I think so.…”

  He cut me off and said loudly, “I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re beating the drum for justice!” He had an impassioned look on his face. He said it again emphatically, “You’ve got to beat the drum for justice.”

  He leaned back in his chair, and I stopped smiling. Something about what he said had sobered me. I answered him softly, “Yes, sir.”

  He leaned forward again and said hoarsely, “You’ve got to keep beating the drum for justice.” He gestured and after a long while said again, “Beat the drum for justice.”

  He leaned back, and in an instant he seemed tired and out of breath. He looked at me sympathetically and waved me closer. I did so, and he pulled me by the arm and leaned forward. He spoke very quietly, almost a whisper, but with a fierceness that was unforgettable.

  “You see this scar on the top of my head?” He tilted his head to show me. “I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama, trying to register to vote in 1964. You see this scar on the side of my head?” He turned his head to the left and I saw a four-inch scar just above his right ear. “I got that scar in Mississippi demanding civil rights.”

  His voice grew stronger. He tightened his grip on my arm and lowered his head some more. “You see that mark?” There was a dark circle at the base of his skull. “I got that bruise in Birmingham after the Children’s Crusade.”

  He leaned back and looked at me intensely. “People think these are my scars, cuts, and bruises.”

  For the first time I noticed that his eyes were wet with tears. He placed his hands on his head. “These aren’t my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, wiped his eyes, and nodded to the boy, who wheeled him away.

  I stood there with a lump in my throat, staring after him.

  After a moment, I realized that the time to open the Alabama office had come.

  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 Cleaner
s 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.