Walter McMillian

Walter "Johnny D." McMillian (October 27, 1941 – September 11, 2013) was a pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

His conviction was wrongfully obtained, based on police coercion and perjury.

Walter McMillian, who was born on October 27, 1941, lived in a Black settlement near Monroeville where he "grew up picking cotton."

Monroe County was described by The Guardian as "a remote, dirt-poor region of pine trees and bean farms".

According to his attorney Bryan Stevenson, McMillian purchased logging and paper mill equipment and became a "moderately successful businessman".

A journalist described him as a "black pulpwood worker".

In 1986 he had been married to Minnie McMillian for 25 years and they had nine children.

McMillian held two jobs and "no criminal record other than a misdemeanor charge stemming [from] a barroom fight".

He "did not have a history of violence."

McMillian was known in the small community for having an affair with a white woman, Karen Kelly.

In addition, one of his sons had married a white woman.

Eighteen-year-old Ronda Morrison, a white dry-cleaning clerk, was murdered at Jackson Cleaners on November 1, 1986, in Monroeville, Alabama.

She had been shot numerous times from behind.

At the time of her murder, Walter McMillian was at a church fish fry, where he was seen by dozens of witnesses, one of whom was a police officer.

McMillian, who had "no prior felony convictions", was arrested by newly elected Sheriff Tom Tate, who was under pressure to find a suspect.

Both McMillian and the attorney he had in 1987, J. L. Chestnut, "contended that Mr. McMillian's relationships alone had made him a suspect."

McMillian was arrested in June 1987.

In what The New York Times described as "an extraordinary move", McMillian "was immediately sent to Alabama's Death Row, in Holman State Prison, Atmore, which is usually reserved for convicted murderers awaiting execution."

He was held there, pre-trial, for 15 months.

McMillian had explained to Sheriff Tate shortly after his arrest that he was at the fish fry on the morning of November 1.

Tate replied, "I don't give a damn what you say or what you do. I don't give a damn what your people say either. I'm going to put twelve people on a jury who are going to find your goddamn black ass guilty."

On December 11, 1987, Walter McMillian and Ralph Bernard Myers, a career criminal, were jointly indicted.

McMillian was charged with a two-count indictment "for the offense of murder made capital because it was committed during a robbery in the first degree", and the jury recommended a life sentence.

Myers pleaded guilty as a conspirator in the murder and received a 30-year prison term.

In the 1988 trial, under a controversial Alabama doctrine called "judicial override", the judge imposed the death penalty, although the jury had voted for a sentence of life imprisonment.

The trial began on August 15, 1988.

Judge Robert E. Lee Key, Jr., "had McMillian await trial on death row, as if a death sentence were a foregone conclusion, and relocated the trial from a county that was forty per cent black to an overwhelmingly white one," Baldwin County, where 86 percent of the residents were white, because the case had "generated extraordinary publicity."

McMillian was represented by attorney J. L. Chestnut.

The trial lasted only a day and a half.

On August 17, 1988, the jury of eleven whites and one African American found McMillian "guilty of the capital offense charged in the indictment" and recommended a life sentence, based on the testimony of four state's informants found by the prosecution: Ralph Myers, a career criminal; Bill Hooks, Jr.; Joe Hightower; and one other.

Two of the witnesses claimed to have seen McMillian's "low-rider" truck outside the dry cleaner's around the time that the crime occurred.

From 1990 to 1993, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals turned down four appeals.

The controversial case received national attention beginning in the fall of 1992.

Bryan Stevenson, McMillian's defense attorney, raised awareness on the CBS News program 60 Minutes.

In 1993, after McMillian had served six years on Alabama's death row, the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the lower court decision and ruled that he had been wrongfully convicted.

In a prison interview in 1993, McMillian said, "The only reason I'm here is because I had been messing around with a white lady and my son married a white lady."

Journalist Pete Earley covered it in his book Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town (1995).

Stevenson featured this early case of his career in a TED talk and in his memoir Just Mercy (2014).

This was adapted as an eponymous feature film, released in 2019.

Jamie Foxx portrays McMillian and Michael B. Jordan stars as Stevenson.