Just Mercy (29 page)

When I pulled into the parking lot, I once again saw that loathsome truck, with its flags, stickers, and menacing gun rack. I feared another encounter with the guard. Sure enough, after checking in with the warden’s secretary and heading toward the visitation room, I saw him approaching me. I braced myself, preparing for the encounter. And then something surprising happened.

“Hello, Mr. Stevenson. How are you?” the guard asked. He sounded earnest and sincere. I was skeptical.

“Well, I’m fine. How are you?” He was looking at me differently from how he had before; he wasn’t glaring and seemed genuinely to want to interact. I decided to play along.

“Look, I’ll step into the bathroom to get ready for your search.”

“Oh, Mr. Stevenson, you don’t have to worry about that,” he quickly replied. “I know you’re okay.” Everything about his tone and demeanor was different.

“Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll go back and sign the book, then.”

“Mr. Stevenson, you don’t have to do that. I saw you coming and signed your name in for you. I’ve taken care of it.” I realized that he actually looked nervous.

I was confused by the shift in his attitude. I thanked him and walked to the visitation room door with the officer following behind me. He turned to unlock the padlock so that I could go inside. As I started to walk past him to enter, he placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Hey, um, I’d like to tell you something.”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

“You know I took ole Avery to court for his hearing and was down there with y’all for those three days. And I, uh, well, I want you to know that I was listening.” He removed his hand from my shoulder and looked past me, as if staring at something behind me. “You know, I—uh, well, I appreciate what you’re doing, I really do. It was kind of
difficult for me to be in that courtroom to hear what y’all was talking about. I came up in foster care, you know. I came up in foster care, too.” His face softened. “Man, I didn’t think anybody had it as bad as me. They moved me around like I wasn’t wanted nowhere. I had it pretty rough. But listening to what you was saying about Avery made me realize that there were other people who had it as bad as I did. I guess even worse. I mean, it brought back a lot of memories, sitting in that courtroom.”

He reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration that had formed on his brow. I noticed for the first time that he had a Confederate flag tattooed on his arm.

“You know, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s good what you’re doing. I got so angry coming up that there were plenty of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry. I made it to eighteen, joined the military, and you know, I’ve been okay. But sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.”

I smiled. He continued: “That expert doctor you put up said that some of the damage that’s done to kids in these abusive homes is permanent; that kind of made me worry. You think that’s true?”

“Oh, I think we can always do better,” I told him. “The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.”

We were both speaking softly to one another. Another officer walked by and stared at us. I went on: “You know, I really appreciate you saying to me what you just said. It means a lot, I really mean that. Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point.”

He looked at me and smiled. “You kept talking about mitigation in that court. I said to myself, ‘What the hell is wrong with him? Why does he keep talking about “mitigation” like that?’ When I got home I looked it up. I wasn’t sure what you meant at first, but now I do.”

I laughed. “Sometimes I get going in court, and I’m not sure I know what I’m saying, either.”

“Well, I think you done good, real good.” He looked me in the eye before he extended his hand. We shook hands and I started toward the door again. I was just about inside when he grabbed my arm again.

“Oh, wait. I’ve got to tell you something else. Listen, I did something I probably wasn’t supposed to do, but I want you to know about it. On the trip back down here after court on that last day—well, I know how Avery is, you know. Well anyway, I just want you to know that I took an exit off the interstate on the way back. And, well, I took him to a Wendy’s, and I bought him a chocolate milkshake.”

I stared at him incredulously, and he broke into a chuckle. Then he locked me inside the room. I was so stunned by what the officer said, I didn’t hear the other officer bring Avery into the room. When I realized Avery was already in the room, I turned and greeted him. When he didn’t say anything, I was a little alarmed.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, sir, I’m fine. Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes, Avery, I’m really doing well.” I waited for our ritual to begin. When he didn’t say anything, I figured I’d just play my part. “Look, I tried to bring you a chocolate milkshake, but they wouldn’t—”

Avery cut me off. “Oh, I got a milkshake. I’m okay now.”

As I began discussing the hearing, he grinned. We talked for an hour before I had to see another client. Avery never again asked me for a chocolate milkshake. We won a new trial for him and ultimately got him off death row and into a facility where he could receive mental health treatment. I never saw the officer again; someone told me he quit not long after that last time I saw him.

It was the third bomb threat in two months. As we quickly cleared the office and waited for the police to arrive, the entire staff was nervous. We now had five attorneys, an investigator, and three administrative staff members. Law students had started arriving for short-term internships, which provided us with additional legal assistance and critically needed investigative help. But none of them had signed on for bomb threats. It was tempting to ignore them, but two years earlier an African American civil rights lawyer in Savannah, Georgia, named Robert “Robbie” Robinson was murdered when a bomb sent to his law office exploded. Around the same time, a federal appeals court judge, Robert Vance, was killed in Birmingham by a mail bomb. Days later a third bomb was sent to a civil rights office in Florida and a fourth to a courthouse in Atlanta. The bomber seemed to be attacking legal professionals connected to civil rights. We were warned that we could be targets, and for weeks we carefully hauled our mail packages to the federal courthouse for X-ray screenings before opening them. After that, bomb threats were no joke.

Everyone fled the building while we discussed the likelihood of an
actual bombing. The caller had described our building precisely when making his threat. Sharon, our receptionist, had scolded the caller. She was a young mother of two small children and had grown up in a poor, rural white family. She spoke to people plainly and directly.

“Why are you doing this? You’re scaring us!”

She said the man had sounded middle-aged and Southern, but she couldn’t give any more of a description. “I’m doing you a favor,” he said threateningly. “I want y’all to stop doing what you’re doing. My first option is not to kill everybody, so you better get out of there now! Next time there won’t be a warning.”

It had been a month since the McMillian hearing. The first time the office was threatened the caller had made racist remarks about the need to teach us a lesson. Around the same time I got threatening calls at home. One typical caller said, “If you think we’re going to let you help that nigger get away with killing that girl, you’ve got another thing coming. You’re both going to be dead niggers!”

Although I was handling other cases, I was certain the calls were in response to the McMillian case. Leading up to the hearing, Michael and I had been followed several times while doing investigative work in Monroe County. A scary man had called me late one night to tell me that someone had offered him a lot of money to kill me, but he said he wasn’t going to do it because he respected what we did. I expressed my appreciation for his support and politely thanked him. It was hard to know how seriously to take any of it, but it was definitely unnerving.

After we cleared the building, the police went through the office with dogs. No bomb was found, and when the building didn’t blow up after an hour and a half, we all filed back inside. We had work to do.

A few days later, I received a different kind of bombshell, this time a call from the clerk’s office in Baldwin County. The clerk was calling to let me know that Judge Norton had ruled in the McMillian case—she needed my fax number to send me a copy of the ruling. I gave it to her
and sat nervously by the fax machine. When only three sheets of paper came through the machine I was concerned.

The pages contained a tersely worded order from Judge Norton denying us relief. I was more disappointed than devastated. I had suspected that this would be Judge Norton’s response. For all his interest at the hearing, he had never seemed particularly engaged over the basic question of whether Walter was guilty or innocent. He was locked into a maintenance role: He was a custodian for the system who was unlikely to overturn the previous judgment, even if there was compelling evidence of innocence.

What was surprising, however, was how superficial, insubstantial, and uninterested the court’s two-and-a-half-page order read. The judge addressed only the testimony of Ralph Myers and none of the legal claims we’d presented or any of the testimonies of the other dozen-plus witnesses. In fact, there was no case law cited in the entire order:

While Chapman had suggested that Myers must have been pressured to recant, the district attorney presented no actual evidence to support that claim, which made the judge’s ruling hard to understand. I had advised Walter and his family that we would likely need to go to an appellate court for any real chance of relief, despite how positive everyone thought the hearing had been.

I was optimistic about what our evidence might accomplish in the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. We were now regularly arguing cases in front of that court. Following my first McMillian argument, we had filed almost two dozen death penalty appeals, and the court
was starting to respond to our advocacy. We had won four reversals in death penalty cases in 1990, four more in 1991, and by the end of 1992, we’d won relief for another eight death row prisoners. The court frequently complained about being forced to order new trials or grant relief, but nonetheless ruled in our favor. In a few years, some of the appellate court judges would be attacked and replaced in partisan judicial elections by candidates who complained about the court’s rulings in death penalty cases. But we persisted and continued raising reversible errors in capital cases. We were pushing the court to enforce the law in these cases, and when they refused, we were having success getting the Alabama Supreme Court and federal courts to grant relief.