Walter McMillian
Walter "Johnny D." McMillian (October 27, 1941 – September 11, 2013)[1] was a pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
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.
[10][11] McMillian, who had "no prior felony convictions",[12] was arrested by newly elected Sheriff Tom Tate, who was under pressure to find a suspect.
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.
[9] 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.
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.
[13][5][Note 2] The "jury ignored multiple alibi defense witnesses, who were black, who testified under oath that he was at a fish fry at the time of the crime.
[5] Six years after the original trial, in an unrelated case, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found that the prosecutor, District Attorney Theodore Pearson, and Judge Key "had practiced 'intentional racial discrimination' in jury selection.
"[Note 3][4] On September 19, 1988, Judge Robert E. Lee Key, Jr., overruled the jury's recommendation of a life sentence and imposed the death penalty.
[14] Key remarked that "McMillian deserved to be executed for the brutal killing of a young lady in the first full flower of adulthood.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama, "No capital sentencing procedure in the United States has come under more criticism as unreliable, unpredictable, and arbitrary" than the judge override.
Stevenson then visited McMillian's community and "met dozens of African-Americans who were with this condemned man at the time the crime took place 11 miles away who absolutely knew he was innocent.
Pearson had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence to McMillian's attorneys, including records from the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility and Myers' June 3 and August 27 statements.
It also emerged that District Attorney Theodore Pearson "had concealed evidence proving his innocence": a witness had seen the victim alive after the time when prosecutors claimed that McMillian had killed her.
After listening to it, they flipped the tape over and discovered a recorded conversation in which Myers complained bitterly that he was being forced to implicate McMillian, whom he did not know, for a crime neither of them had any role in.
[7] Upon discovery of this evidence, District Attorney Thomas Chapman, who had represented the state in McMillian's previous appeals, told Stevenson, "I want to do everything I can so that your client will not have to spend a single day more than he already has on death row.
"[6] Stevenson disagreed, telling the court that "it was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn't do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence.
It was appealed to the United States Supreme Court,[19] which ruled against McMillian, holding that a county sheriff could not be sued for monetary damages.
It was pointed out that Monroeville, Alabama, was "best known as the home of Harper Lee, whose To Kill a Mockingbird told a painful story of race and justice in the small-town Jim Crow South.
"[6] The story was featured in a 1995 book entitled Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town by former Washington Post journalist Pete Earley.
