Walter McMillian

Walter "Johnny D." McMillian (October 27, 1941 – September 11, 2013) was a pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, who was wrongfully convicted of murder. His conviction was wrongfully obtained, based on police coercion and perjury. In the 1988 trial, under a controversial and now abolished Alabama doctrine known as judicial override, the judge imposed the death penalty, although the jury had voted for a sentence of life imprisonment.

From 1990 to 1993, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals turned down four appeals. In 1993, after McMillian had served six years on Alabama's death row, the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the lower court decision and ruled that he had been wrongfully convicted.

The controversial case received national attention beginning in the fall of 1992. Bryan Stevenson, McMillian's defense attorney, raised awareness on the CBS News program 60 Minutes. Journalist Pete Earley covered it in his book Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town (1995). Stevenson featured this early case of his career in a TED talk and in his memoir Just Mercy (2014). This was adapted as an eponymous feature film, released in 2019. Jamie Foxx portrays McMillian and Michael B. Jordan stars as Stevenson.

In an interview in 2005, Stevenson said the judge had inadvertently done McMillian a favor by sentencing him to death. Since McMillian had been sentenced to death, this resulted in Stevenson, who was working specifically on capital cases, taking up his case. Had McMillian instead been sentenced to life imprisonment as recommended by the jury, Stevenson said, "he would be in prison today."

Context Walter McMillian, who was born on October 27, 1941, lived in a Black settlement near Monroeville where he "grew up picking cotton." According to his attorney Bryan Stevenson, McMillian purchased logging and paper mill equipment and became a "moderately successful businessman". Both McMillian and the attorney he had in 1987, J. L. Chestnut, "contended that Mr. McMillian's relationships alone had made him a suspect."

Arrest McMillian, who had "no prior felony convictions", McMillian was arrested in June 1987. 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."

Trial and sentencing The trial began on August 15, 1988. 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."

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." Key remarked that "McMillian deserved to be executed for the brutal killing of a young lady in the first full flower of adulthood."

Since then, the frequency of the judicial override in Alabama has come under scrutiny: "Nearly seventy Alabama judges have single-handedly ordered an inmate's execution, and collectively they have done so more than a hundred times. Thirty-six of the nearly two hundred convicts on death row are there because of override."

In November 1988, 28-year-old attorney Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard Law School and Harvard School of Government graduate (as an undergraduate, he attended Eastern University, graduating with a degree in philosophy), who was the director of the newly formed Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center in Montgomery, took on the task of appealing the case. When he visited McMillian in prison, McMillian maintained his innocence. Stevenson was motivated to take McMillian's case because of the use of the judge override.

After he had decided to take the appeal, he got a phone call from Judge Key discouraging Stevenson from taking the case. In a 2015 NPR interview, Stevenson described how that phone call was a "very, very bizarre start to my career and to the work that I was doing in Alabama." 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."

First appeal (1991) From 1990 to 1993, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals turned down four appeals.

In 1992 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in McMillian v. State 594 So. 2d 1289 (Ala.Cr.App.1992) denied the claims by McMillian's attorneys. D.A. 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. which ruled against McMillian, holding that a county sheriff could not be sued for monetary damages.

Life after McMillian later developed dementia, believed to have been brought on by the trauma of imprisonment. He died on September 11, 2013.

Books and film 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.