The phone rang, and Jackie jumped up to answer it. She came back a few minutes later. “Eddie said that people are getting restless. They want to know when he’s going to be there.”
Minnie stood up and straightened her dress. “Well, we should probably get going down there. They been waiting most of the day for you.”
When I looked confused, Minnie smiled. “Oh, I told the rest of the family we would bring you down there, since it’s so hard to find where they live if you’ve never been there before. His sisters, nephews, nieces, and other folks all want to meet you.” I tried not to show my alarm, but I was getting worried about the time.
We piled into my two-door Corolla, which was stacked with papers, trial transcripts, and court records. “You must spend your money on other things,” Jackie joked as we pulled away.
“Yes, expensive suits are my spending priority these days,” I replied.
“There’s nothing wrong with your suit or your car,” Minnie said protectively.
I followed their directions down a long, winding dirt road full of impossible turns through a heavily wooded area. As darkness fell around us, the road twisted through dense forest for several miles until it came to a short, narrow bridge with room for only one car to pass. It looked shaky and unstable, so I slowed the car to a stop.
“It’s okay. It hasn’t rained that much, and that’s the only time when it’s really a problem,” Minnie said.
“What kind of problem?” I didn’t want to sound scared, but we were in the middle of nowhere and in the pitch-black night I couldn’t tell whether it was a swamp, a creek, or a small river under the bridge.
“It will be all right. People drive through here every day,” Jackie chimed in.
It would have been too embarrassing to turn around, so I drove slowly across the bridge and was relieved when we had made it to the other side. I continued for another mile until the forest began to give way to trailers, a few small homes, and finally, an entire community hidden away in the woods.
We pulled up a hill until we reached a trailer that was glowing in the darkness, lit by a fire burning in a barrel out front. Six or seven small children were playing outside; they dashed into the trailer when they saw our car pull up. As we got out of the car, a tall man emerged from the trailer. He walked up to us and hugged Minnie and Jackie before shaking my hand.
“They been waiting for you,” he told me. “I know you probably got a lot of work to do, but we appreciate you coming to meet with us. I’m Giles, Walter’s nephew.”
Giles led me to the trailer and opened the door for me to step inside. The small home was packed with more than thirty people, whose chattering fell silent when I walked in. I was startled by the size of the group, which stared at me appraisingly and then, one by one, started to smile at me. Then, to my amazement, the room broke into loud applause. I was stunned by the gesture. No one had ever applauded me just for showing up. There were older women, younger women, men Walter’s age, and several men much older. Their faces were creased with a by-now familiar look of anxiety. When the applause had died down, I began to speak.
“Thank you, that’s very kind,” I started. “I’m so glad to meet you all. Mr. McMillian told me he had a large family, but I didn’t expect so many of you to be here. I saw him today, and he wants me to pass along his thanks and his gratitude to all of you for sticking by him. I hope you know how much your support means. He has to wake up on death row every morning, and that’s not easy. But he knows he’s not alone. He talks about you all the time.”
“Sit down, Mr. Stevenson,” someone shouted. I took a seat on an empty couch that seemed to have been reserved for me and Minnie sat down beside me. Everyone else stood, facing me.
“We don’t have any money. We gave it all to the first lawyer,” called out one of the men.
“I understand that, and I won’t take a penny. I work for a nonprofit law office, and we provide legal assistance at no cost to the people we represent,” I replied.
“Well, how do you pay the bills?” asked one young woman. People laughed at the question.
“We get donations from foundations and people who support our work.”
“Well, you get Johnny D home, and I’ll make all kinds of donations,” said another woman slyly. People laughed and I smiled.
An older woman spoke up. It was Armelia Hand. “We don’t have much, Mr. Stevenson, but you have someone we love in your care. Anything we have, you have. These people have broken our hearts,” she said.
I began answering questions and listening to comments and testimonials about Walter, the town, race, the police, the trial, and the way the whole family was now being treated by people in the community. The hours passed, and I knew that I had probably exhausted whatever helpful information could be obtained from Walter’s family, but folks still wanted to talk. There seemed to be therapeutic relief in voicing their concerns to me. Before long I heard some hopefulness in their questions and comments. I explained the appeals process and talked about the kind of issues that were already apparent from the record. I began to feel encouraged that some of the information I provided maybe eased their anxiety. We started to joke some, and before I knew it I felt embraced in a way that energized me.
An older woman had given me a tall glass of sweet iced tea as I sat there listening and responding to questions. I drank the first glass thirstily because I was a little nervous (the tea was very good). The woman watched me drain the glass and smiled at me with a look of great satisfaction. She quickly filled the glass, and no matter how much or how little I drank, she minded my glass religiously the entire evening. After over three hours, Minnie grabbed my hand and announced that they should let me go. It was close to midnight, and it would take me at least two hours to get to Montgomery. I said my farewells and exchanged hugs with practically everyone in the room before stepping out into the dark night.
December is rarely bitter cold in South Alabama during the day, but at night the temperatures can drop, a dramatic reminder that it’s winter, even in the South. Without an overcoat, I cranked up the heat for the long drive home after dropping Minnie and Jackie back at their house. The meeting with the family had been inspiring. There were clearly a lot of people who cared deeply about Walter and consequently cared about what I did and how I could help. But it was also clear that people had been traumatized by what had happened. Several of the people I met weren’t actually related but had been at the fish fry on the day of the crime. They were so deeply disturbed by Walter’s conviction that they, too, had come over when they heard that I was coming. They needed a place to share their hurt and confusion.
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois included in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a brilliant but haunting short story. I thought about “Of the Coming of John” on the drive home. In Du Bois’s story, a young black man in coastal Georgia is sent off hundreds of miles to a school that trains black teachers. The entire black community where he was born had raised the money for his tuition. The community invests in John so that he can one day return and teach African American children who are barred from attending the public school. Casual and fun-loving, John almost flunks out of his new school until he considers the trust he’s been given and the shame he would face if he returned without graduating. Newly focused, sober, and intensely committed to succeed, he graduates with honors and returns to his community intent on changing things.
John convinces the white judge who controls the town to allow him to open a school for black children. His education has empowered him, and he has strong opinions about racial freedom and equality that land him and the black community in trouble. The judge shuts down the school when he hears what John’s been teaching. John walks home after the school’s closing frustrated and distraught. On the trip home he sees his sister being groped by the judge’s adult son and he reacts violently, striking the man in the head with a piece of wood. John continues home to say goodbye to his mother. Du Bois ends the tragic story when the furious judg
e catches up to John with the lynch mob he has assembled.
I read the story several times in college because I identified with John as the hope of an entire community. None of my aunts or uncles had graduated from college; many hadn’t graduated from high school. The people in my church always encouraged me and never asked me for anything back, but I felt a debt accumulating. Du Bois understood this dynamic deeply and brought it to life in a way that absolutely fascinated me. (I just hoped that my parallel with John wouldn’t extend to the getting lynched part.)
Driving home that night from meeting Walter’s family, I thought of the story in a whole new way. I had never before considered how devastated John’s community must have felt after his lynching. Things would become so much harder for the people who had given everything to help make John a teacher. For the surviving black community, there would be more obstacles to opportunity and progress and much heartache. John’s education had led not to liberation and progress but to violence and tragedy. There would be more distrust, more animosity, and more injustice.
Walter’s family and most poor black people in his community were similarly burdened by Walter’s conviction. Even if they hadn’t been at his house the day of the crime, most black people in Monroeville knew someone who had been with Walter that day. The pain in that trailer was tangible—I could feel it. The community seemed desperate for some hope of justice. The realization left me anxious but determined.
I’d gotten used to taking calls from lots of people concerning Walter’s case. Most were poor and black, and they offered encouragement and support, and my visit with the family generated even more of those calls. And occasionally, a white person for whom Walter had worked would call to offer support, like Sam Crook. When Sam called, he insisted that I come and see him the next time I was back in town.
“I’m a rebel,” he said toward the end of our call. “Part of the 117th division of the Confederate Army.”
“Sir?”
“My people were heroes of the Confederacy. I’ve inherited their land, their title, and their pride. I love this county, but I know what happened to Walter McMillian ain’t right.”
“Well, I appreciate your call.”
“You’re going to need some backup, someone who knows some of these people you’re going against, and I’m going to help you.”
“I’d be very grateful for your help.”
“I’ll tell you something else.” He lowered his voice. “Do you think your phone is being tapped?”
“No, sir, I think my phone is clear.”
Sam’s voice rose in volume again.
“Well, I’ve decided I ain’t going to let them string him up. I’ll get some boys, and we’ll go cut him down before we let them take him. I’m just not going to stand for them putting a good man down for something I know he didn’t do.”
Sam Crook spoke in grand proclamations. I hesitated over how to respond.
“Well … thank you,” was all I could manage.
When I later asked Walter about Sam Crook, he just smiled. “I’ve done a lot of work for him. He’s been good to me. He’s a very interesting guy.”
I saw Walter just about every other week for those first few months, and I learned some of his habits. “Interesting” was Walter’s euphemism for odd people, and having worked for hundreds of people throughout the county over the years, he’d encountered no shortage of “interesting” people. The more unusual or bizarre the person was, the more “interesting” they would become in Walter’s parlance. “Very interesting” and “real interesting” and finally “Now, he’s reeeeaaaalll interesting” were the markers for strange and stranger characters. Walter seemed reluctant to say anything bad about anyone. He’d just chuckle if he thought someone was odd.
Walter grew much more relaxed during our visits. As we became more comfortable with each other, he would sometimes veer into topics that had nothing to do with the case. We talked about the guards at the prison and his experiences dealing with other prisoners. He talked about people back home he thought would visit but hadn’t. In these conversations, Walter showed remarkable empathy. He spent a lot of time imagining what other people were thinking and feeling that might mitigate their behavior. He guessed what frustrations guards must be experiencing to excuse the rude things they said to him. He gave voice to how hard it must be to visit someone on death row.
We talked about food he liked, jobs he’d worked when he was younger. We talked about race and power, the things we saw that were funny, and the things we saw that were sad. It made him feel better to have a normal conversation with someone who wasn’t on the row or a guard, and I always spent extra time with him to talk about things unrelated to the case. Not just for him but for myself as well.
I was trying so hard to get the project off the ground that my work had quickly become my life. I found something refreshing in the moments I spent with clients when we didn’t relate to one another as attorney and client but as friends. Walter’s case was becoming the most complicated and time-consuming I’d ever worked on, and spending time with him was comforting even though it made me feel the pressure of his mistreatment in ways that became increasingly personal.
“Man, all these guys talk about how you’re working on their case. You must not ever get any peace,” he told me once.
“Well, everybody needs help, so we’re trying.”
He gave me an odd look that I hadn’t seen before. I think he wasn’t sure whether he could give me advice—he hadn’t done that yet. Finally, he seemed to say what he was thinking.
“Well, you know you can’t help everybody,” he looked at me earnestly. “You’ll kill yourself if you try to do that.” He continued looking at me with concern.
I smiled. “I know.”
“I mean, you gotta help me. You shouldn’t hold nothing back on my case,” he said with a smile. “I expect you to fight all comers to get me out of here. Take ’em all down, if necessary.”
“Stand up to giants, slay wild beasts, wrestle alligators …,” I joked.
“Yeah, and get somebody ready to take over the battle in case they chop your head off, ’cause I’m still going to need help if they take you out.”
The more time I spent with Walter, the more I was persuaded that he was a kind, decent man with a generous nature. He freely acknowledged that he’d made poor decisions, particularly where women were concerned. By all accounts—from friends, family, and associates like Sam Crook—Walter generally tried to do the right thing. I never regarded our time together as wasted or unproductive.
In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation and deal with the stress of a potential execution; it’s also key to effective advocacy. A client’s life often depends on his lawyer’s ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone’s background that no one has previously discovered—things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important—requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment won’t happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible. But it also creates genuine connections with clients. And that’s certainly what happened with Walter.
Shortly after my first trip to see Walter’s family, I received a call from a young man named Darnell Houston who told me that he could prove that Walter was innocent. His voice shook with nerves but he was determined to speak to me. He didn’t want to talk on the phone, so I drove down to meet with him one afternoon. He lived in a rural part of Monroe County on farmland that his family had worked since the time of slavery. Darnell was a sincere young man, and I could tell he’d been debating for a while whether to cont
act me.
When I arrived at his home, he walked out to greet me. He was a young black man in his twenties who had joined the “Jheri curl” craze. I had already noticed that the popular process of chemically treating black hair to make it looser and easier to style had come to Monroeville; I’d seen several black men, young and old, sporting the look with pride. The cheerful bounce of Darnell’s hair contrasted with his worried demeanor. As soon as we sat down, he got right to business.
“Mr. Stevenson,” he began. “I can prove that Walter McMillian is innocent.”
“Really?”
“Bill Hooks is lying. I didn’t know he was even involved in that case until they told me he was part of how they put Walter McMillian on death row. First, I didn’t believe Bill could have been part of this, but then I found out that he testified that he drove by that cleaners on the day that girl was killed, and that’s a lie.”
“How do you know?”
“We were working together all that day. We both worked at the NAPA auto parts store last November. I remember that Saturday when that girl was killed because ambulances and police started racing up the street. It went on for like thirty minutes. I’d been working in town for a couple of years and had never seen anything like it.”
“You were working on the Saturday morning that Ronda Morrison was killed?”
“Yes, sir, with Bill Hooks from about eight in the morning till we closed after lunch, after all them ambulances went by our shop. It was probably close to eleven when the sirens started. Bill was working on a car in the shop with me. There ain’t but one way out the store; he never left the entire morning. If he said he drove by the cleaners when that girl was killed, he’s lying.”
One of the most frustrating things about reading Walter’s trial record had been that the State’s witnesses—Ralph Myers, Bill Hooks, and Joe Hightower—were so obviously not believable. Their testimony was laughably inconsistent and completely lacking in credibility. Myers’s account of his role in the crime—Walter kidnapping him to drive him to the crime scene and then dropping him off afterward—never made any sense. Hooks, a critical witness against McMillian, wasn’t persuasive or reliable in the transcript—he just repeated the same story he’d given the police about driving by the cleaners at the time of the crime. His response to every line of questioning was to repeat over and over again that he saw Walter McMillian walk out of the store with a bag, get into his “low-rider” truck, and get driven away by a white man. He could not answer any of Chestnut’s questions about what else he saw that day or what he was doing in the area. He just kept repeating that he saw McMillian at the cleaners. But the state needed Hooks’s testimony.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Page 11