Just Mercy (26 page)

“Attorney Stevenson, I feel so bad. I feel so bad,” she said and grabbed my hands.

“I should have come into that courtroom this morning. I was supposed to be in that courtroom this morning,” she said and began to weep.

“Mrs. Williams, it’s all right,” I said. “They shouldn’t have done what they did. Please don’t worry about it.” I put my arm around her and gave her a hug.

“No, no, no, Attorney Stevenson. I was meant to be in that courtroom, I was supposed to be in that courtroom.”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Williams, it’s okay.”

“No, sir, I was supposed to be there and I wanted to be there. I tried, I tried, Lord knows I tried, Mr. Stevenson. But when I saw that dog—” She shook her head and stared away with a distant look. “When I saw that dog, I thought about 1965, when we gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and tried to march for our voting rights. They beat us and put those dogs on us.” She looked back to me sadly. “I tried to move, Attorney Stevenson, I wanted to move, but I just couldn’t do it.”

As she spoke it seemed like a world of sadness surrounded her. She let go of my hand and walked away. I watched her get into a car with some other people I had seen in the courtroom earlier.

I drove back to the motel in a more somber mood to start preparing for the last day of hearings.

I arrived at the court early the next morning to make sure there were no problems. As it turned out, very few people showed up to support the State. And though the metal detector and the dog were still there, no deputy stood at the door to block black people from entering the courtroom. Inside the courtroom, I noticed one of the women I’d seen leave with Mrs. Williams the night before. She came up to me and introduced herself as Mrs. Williams’s daughter. She thanked me for trying to console her mother.

“When she got home last night, she was so upset. She didn’t eat anything, she didn’t speak to anybody, she just went to her bedroom. We could hear her praying all night long. This morning she called the Reverend and begged him for another chance to be a community representative at the hearing. She was up when I got out of bed, dressed and ready to come to court. I told her she didn’t have to come, but she wouldn’t hear none of it. She’s been through a lot and, well, on the trip down here she just kept saying over and over, ‘Lord, I can’t be scared of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.’ ”

I was apologizing again to the daughter for what the court officials had done the day before when suddenly there was a commotion at the courtroom door. We both looked up and there stood Mrs. Williams. She was once again dressed impeccably in her scarf and hat. She held her handbag tight at her side and seemed to be swaying at the entrance. I could hear her speaking to herself, repeating over and over again: “I ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” I watched as the officers allowed her to move forward. She held her head up as she walked slowly through the metal detector, repeating over and over, “I ain’t scared of no dog.” It was impossible to look away. She made it through the detector and stared at the dog. Then, loud enough for everyone to hear, she belted out: “I ain’t scared of no dog!”

She moved past the dog and walked into the courtroom. Black folks who were already inside beamed with joy as she passed them. She sat
down near the front of the courtroom and turned to me with a broad smile and announced, “Attorney Stevenson, I’m here!”

“Mrs. Williams, it’s so good to see you here. Thank you for coming.”

The courtroom filled up, and I started getting my papers together. They brought Walter into the courtroom, the signal that the hearing was about to begin. That’s when I heard Mrs. Williams call my name.

“No, Attorney Stevenson, you didn’t hear me. I said I’m here.” She spoke very loudly, and I was a little confused and embarrassed. I turned around and smiled at her.

“No, Mrs. Williams, I did hear you, and I’m so glad you’re here.” When I looked at her, though, it was as if she was in her own world.

The courtroom was packed, and the bailiff brought the court to order as the judge walked in. Everyone rose, as is the custom. When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long pause as we all waited for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” People chuckled nervously as she took her seat, but when she looked at me, I saw tears in her eyes.

In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition. I smiled now, because I knew she was saying to the room, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.”

I smiled at Mrs. Williams while she sat proudly. For the first time since I started working on the case, everything we were struggling to achieve finally seemed to make sense. It took me a minute to realize that the judge was calling my name, impatiently asking me to begin.

The last day of hearings went well. There were a half-dozen people who had been jailed or imprisoned with Ralph Myers whom Ralph had told he was being pressured to give false testimony against Walter McMillian. We found most of them and had them testify. They were consistent in what they related. Isaac Dailey, who had been falsely accused by Myers of committing the Pittman murder, explained how Myers had falsely implicated Walter in the Pittman crime. Myers had confided to Dailey after he was arrested that he and Karen had discussed pinning the Pittman murder on Walter. “He related to us that he and Karen did the killing and, ah, plotted together to put it off on Johnny D.”

Another inmate who wrote letters for Myers at the Monroe County Jail explained that Myers didn’t know McMillian, had no knowledge of the Morrison murder, and was being pressured by police to testify falsely against McMillian.

We saved the most powerful evidence for the end. The tapes that Tate, Benson, and Ikner had made when they interrogated Myers were pretty dramatic. The multiple recorded statements Myers gave to the police featured Myers repeatedly telling the police that he didn’t know anything about the Morrison murder or Walter McMillian. They included the officers’ threats against Myers and Myers’s resistance to framing an innocent man for murder. Not only did the tapes confirm Myers’s recantation and contradict his trial testimony, they exposed the lie that Pearson had told the court, the jury, and McMillian’s trial counsel—that there were only two statements provided by Myers. In fact, Myers gave at least six additional statements to the police that were largely consistent with his testimony at the Rule 32 hearing that he had no information about Walter McMillian committing the Ronda Morrison murder. All of these recorded statements were typed, exculpatory, and favorable to Walter McMillian, and none of them had been disclosed to McMillian’s attorneys, as was required.

I called on McMillian’s trial lawyers, Bruce Boynton and J. L. Chestnut,
to testify about how much more they could have done to win an acquittal if the State had turned over the evidence it had suppressed. We finished the presentation of our evidence and, to our surprise, the State put on no rebuttal case. I didn’t know what they could have presented to rebut our evidence, but I’d assumed they would present
something
. The judge seemed surprised, too. He paused and then said he wanted the parties to submit written briefs arguing what ruling he should make. We had hoped for this, and I was relieved that the court would give us time to explain the significance of all the evidence in writing and assist him in preparing his order, an order I hoped would set Walter free. At the end of three days of intense litigation, the judge adjourned the proceedings in the late afternoon.

Michael and I had been in a rush the final morning of the hearing and hadn’t checked out of our hotel before leaving for the courthouse. We said our farewells to the family in the courtroom and went back to the hotel, feeling exhausted but satisfied.

Bay Minette, where the hearing took place, is about thirty minutes from the beautiful beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. We had started a tradition of bringing our staff down to the beach each September, and we’d all fallen in love with the clear warm waters of the Gulf. The white sand and pleasantly underdeveloped beachfront were spectacular and soothing. The view was slightly spoiled by the massive offshore oil rigs you could see in the distance, but if you could make yourself forget about them, you’d think you were in paradise. Dolphins loved this part of the Gulf and could be spotted in the early mornings, playfully making their way through the water. I’d often thought we should move our office to right there on the beach.

It was Michael’s idea to hit the beach before heading back to Montgomery. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but the day was warm and the coast was so close, I couldn’t resist. We jumped in the car, trailing the last hours of sunlight to the beautiful shores near Fort Morgan, Alabama. As soon as we got there, Michael changed from his suit to
swim trunks and went sprinting into the ocean. I was too tired to race into the sea, so I put on some shorts and sat down at the water’s edge. It would soon be dusk, but the heat persisted. My head was full of everything that had transpired in court: I was replaying what witnesses had said and worrying about whether things had gone exactly right. I was trawling through every detail in my mind, every possible misstep, until I caught myself. It was over; there was no point in making myself crazy by overthinking it now. I decided to dive into the ocean and, for a moment at least, forget it all.

Recently, stranded at the airport with nothing else to read, I had read an article about shark attacks. As I approached the waves at Fort Morgan, now lit by the sunset, I remembered that sharks feed at dusk and at dawn. I watched Michael swimming far off shore, and as fun as it looked, I knew I’d be the more vulnerable target if a shark showed up. Michael swam like a fish while I barely stayed afloat.

Michael waved at me and shouted: “B-man, come on out!” I cautiously ventured into the water far enough to explain my concerns about sharks to him. He laughed at me. The water felt warm and wonderful, comforting in a way I hadn’t expected. A school of fish zipped by my legs, and I stared at them in wonder until I realized that they might be fleeing some larger predator. I carefully made my way back to the shore.

I sat on the sandy shore and watched the brilliant white pelicans gliding effortlessly over the still waters in search of food. Small fiddler crabs scurried around me, too fearful to get close but curious enough to linger nearby. I thought about Walter making his way back to Holman, shackled in the back of the van again. I wanted him to be hopeful but grounded enough to manage whatever the court decided. I thought about his family and all the people who had come to court. They’d kept the faith through the five years that had passed since Walter was first arrested, and now they had cause to feel energized and encouraged. I thought about Mrs. Williams. She had come up to me after the hearings and had given me a sweet kiss on the cheek. I told her how happy I was she’d come back to court. She looked at me playfully.
“Attorney Stevenson, you
know
I was going to be here, and you
know
I wasn’t going to let these people keep me out.” Her words had made me smile.

Michael got out of the water looking worried.

“What did you see?” I joked. “Shark? Eel? Poisonous jellyfish? Stingray? Piranha?”

He was out of breath. “They’ve threatened us, lied to us, there are people who have told us that some folks in the county are so unnerved by what we’re doing that they’re going to kill us. What do you think they’re going to do now that they know how much evidence we have to prove Walter’s innocence?”

I had given this some thought, too. Our opponents had done everything they could to frame Walter—in order to kill him. They’d lied to us and subverted the judicial process. More than a few people had passed on to us that they’d heard angry people in the community make threats on our lives because they believed we were trying to help a guilty murderer get off death row.