Just Mercy (19 page)

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.”

“Well, people told me I could trust you. I don’t know anything about him.”

“I promise, he’s fine.” I glanced over at Michael, who was trying his best to look trustworthy, before turning back to Myers. “Please have a seat.”

He looked at Michael skeptically and then slowly sat down. My plan was to try to ease him into the conversation by letting him know that
we just wanted the truth. But before I could say anything, Myers blurted out a full recantation of his trial testimony.

“I lied. Everything I said at McMillian’s trial was a lie. I’ve lost a lot of sleep and have been in a lot of pain over this. I can’t be quiet any longer.”

“The testimony you gave at trial against Walter McMillian was a lie?” I asked cautiously.

My heart was pounding, but I tried to stay as steady as I could. I was afraid that if I seemed too eager or too surprised—too
anything
—he might retreat.

“It was all a lie. What I’m going to tell you is going to blow your mind, Mr. Stevenson.”

He held his stare on me dramatically before turning to Michael. “You, too, Jimmy Connors.” It didn’t take many conversations with Ralph before it became clear that he had difficulty remembering names.

“Mr. Myers, you know I’m going to want you to not only tell me the truth but also tell the court the truth. Are you willing to do that?”

I was nervous to push so quickly, but I needed to be clear. I didn’t want a private performance.

“That’s why I called you.” He sounded surprised that there could be any question about his intentions. “I’ve been in a group therapy class here. You’re supposed to be real honest. We been talking about honesty for nearly three months. Last week people were talking about all the bad shit that happened to them when they were kids and all the bad things they done.”