Walter McMillian was a Black man in Monroeville, Alabama — the town where Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. In 1988, he was convicted of murdering a white woman named Ronda Morrison. He was sentenced to death despite the fact that dozens of witnesses placed him at a church fish fry eleven miles from the crime scene at the time of the murder.
A Conviction Built on Lies
The prosecution's case rested almost entirely on the testimony of Ralph Myers, a man with a criminal record who later admitted he had been pressured by law enforcement to lie. The police had also suppressed exculpatory evidence — including witness statements and forensic evidence that pointed away from McMillian. The trial lasted a day and a half.
What made the case particularly outrageous was the procedural corruption. The jury recommended life imprisonment. The judge overrode the jury and imposed the death sentence — a practice that was legal in Alabama at the time.
Bryan Stevenson Takes the Case
In 1989, Bryan Stevenson — then a young Harvard-trained lawyer who had just founded the Equal Justice Initiative — began investigating McMillian's conviction. Over three years, Stevenson's team uncovered the suppressed evidence, secured Myers's recantation on the record, and presented new forensic analysis that dismantled the prosecution's theory.
In 1993, McMillian's conviction was overturned and all charges dismissed. He had spent six years on death row. His case became the centrepiece of Stevenson's memoir Just Mercy, later adapted into a major film.
What This Means for You
McMillian's case is uncomfortable because it happened in a community that prided itself on its literary connection to racial justice. Monroeville built a museum to Atticus Finch while convicting a real Black man on fabricated evidence. Justice requires more than good stories. It requires people who do the work.