Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

  “Well, people told me I could trust you. I don’t know anything about him.”

  “I promise, he’s fine.” I glanced over at Michael, who was trying his best to look trustworthy, before turning back to Myers. “Please have a seat.”

  He looked at Michael skeptically and then slowly sat down. My plan was to try to ease him into the conversation by letting him know that we just wanted the truth. But before I could say anything, Myers blurted out a full recantation of his trial testimony.

  “I lied. Everything I said at McMillian’s trial was a lie. I’ve lost a lot of sleep and have been in a lot of pain over this. I can’t be quiet any longer.”

  “The testimony you gave at trial against Walter McMillian was a lie?” I asked cautiously.

  My heart was pounding, but I tried to stay as steady as I could. I was afraid that if I seemed too eager or too surprised—too anything—he might retreat.

  “It was all a lie. What I’m going to tell you is going to blow your mind, Mr. Stevenson.”

  He held his stare on me dramatically before turning to Michael. “You, too, Jimmy Connors.” It didn’t take many conversations with Ralph before it became clear that he had difficulty remembering names.

  “Mr. Myers, you know I’m going to want you to not only tell me the truth but also tell the court the truth. Are you willing to do that?”

  I was nervous to push so quickly, but I needed to be clear. I didn’t want a private performance.

  “That’s why I called you.” He sounded surprised that there could be any question about his intentions. “I’ve been in a group therapy class here. You’re supposed to be real honest. We been talking about honesty for nearly three months. Last week people were talking about all the bad shit that happened to them when they were kids and all the bad things they done.”

  Myers was picking up steam as he spoke.

  “I finally told the group, ‘Well, I can top all you sons ’a bitches, I done put a damn man on death row by lying in damn court.’ ”

  He paused dramatically.

  “After I told all of ’em what I’d done, everybody said I needed to make it right. That’s what I’m tryin’ to do.” He paused again to let me take it all in. “Hey, y’all gonna buy me a damn soda, or am I just gonna sit here all day looking at them damn vending machines and pouring my heart out?” He smiled for the first time since we’d been together. Michael jumped up and walked over to buy him a drink.

  “Hey, Jimmy, Sunkist Orange, if they got it.”

  For more than two hours, I asked questions and Ralph gave answers. By the end, he did, in fact, blow my mind. He told us about being pressured by the sheriff and the ABI and threatened with the death penalty if he didn’t testify against McMillian. He made accusations of official corruption, talked about his involvement in the Pittman murder, and revealed his earlier attempts to recant. He ultimately admitted that he had never known anything about the Morrison murder, had no clue what had happened to her or anything else at all about the crime. He said that he had told lots of people—from the D.A. on down—that he had been coerced to testify falsely against Walter. If even half of what he said was true, there were a lot of people involved in this case who knew, from the mouth of his sole accuser, that Walter McMillian had had nothing to do with the murder of Ronda Morrison.

  Ralph was on his third Sunkist Orange when he stopped his stream of confessions, leaned forward, and beckoned us closer. He spoke in a whisper to Michael and me.

  “You know they’ll try to kill you if you actually get to the bottom of everything.”

  We would learn that Ralph could never let a meeting end without dropping some final dramatic insight, observation, or prediction. I reassured him that we would be careful.

  On the drive back to Montgomery, Michael and I debated how much we could trust Myers. What he told us about the McMillian case all made sense. His story at trial was so implausible that it was easy to believe that he had been pressured to testify falsely. The corruption narrative that he seemed intent to expose was harder to assess. Myers claimed to have committed the Vickie Pittman murder under the direction of another local sheriff; he laid out to us a widespread conspiracy involving police, drug dealing, and money laundering. It was quite a tale.

  We spent weeks following up on the leads that Myers had provided. He admitted to us that he had never met Walter and only knew of him through Karen Kelly. He also confirmed that he had been spending time with Karen Kelly and that she was involved in the Pittman murder. So we decided to confirm the story with Kelly herself, now a prisoner at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, where she was serving a ten-year sentence for the Pittman murder. Tutwiler is one of the state’s oldest prisons and the only prison in the state for women. It has fewer security restrictions than the men’s prisons. When Michael and I drove up to the gate, we could see incarcerated women hovering outside the prison entrance with no officers in view. The women eyed Michael and me carefully before greeting us with curious smiles. We were subjected to a very cursory pat-down in the prison lobby by a male officer before being admitted through the barred gate to the main prison area. We were told to wait for Karen Kelly in a very small room that was empty except for a square table.

  Kelly was a slender white woman in her mid-thirties who walked into the room wearing no restraints or handcuffs. She seemed surprisingly comfortable, shaking my hand confidently before nodding at Michael. She was wearing makeup, including a garish shade of green eye shadow. She sat down and announced that Walter had been framed and that she was grateful finally to be able to tell someone. When we began with our questions, she quickly confirmed that Myers had not known Walter before the Morrison murder.

  “Ralph is a fool. He thought he could trust those crooked cops, and he let them talk him into saying he was involved with a crime he didn’t know anything about. He’s done enough bad that he didn’t need to go around making stuff up.”

  Though she was calm at the outset of our interview, she became increasingly emotional as she started detailing the events surrounding the case. She wept more than once. She spoke with remorse about how her life had spiraled out of control when she started abusing drugs.

  “I’m not a bad person, but I’ve made some really foolish, bad decisions.”

  She was especially upset that Walter was on death row.

  “I feel like I’m the reason that he’s in prison. He’s just not the kind of person that would kill somebody, I know that.” Then her tone turned bitter. “I made a lot of mistakes, but those people should be ashamed. They’ve done just as much bad as I’ve done. Sheriff Tate only had one thing on his mind. He just kept saying, ‘Why you want to sleep with niggers? Why you want to sleep with niggers?’ It was awful, and he’s awful.” She paused and looked down at her hands. “But I’m awful, too. Look at what I’ve done,” she said sadly.

  I began getting letters from Karen Kelly after our visit. She wanted me to tell Walter how sorry she was about what had happened to him. She said she still cared about him a great deal. It wasn’t clear what we could expect from Karen if we got a new hearing in court, other than to confirm that Ralph had never met Walter. It was clear that she saw Walter as the kind of person who would never kill someone violently, which was consistent with the opinion of everyone who knew him. She hadn’t dealt with the police much around the Morrison murder and didn’t have useful information pointing to their misconduct, aside from being able to show how they were provoked by her relationship with Walter.

  Michael and I decided to spend more time looking into the Pittman murder; we thought it might give us some perspective on the coercion that was leveled against Myers. We now knew that because Myers had recanted his accusations against Walter before the trial, the State might not be entirely surprised to hear that he was denying McMillian’s involvement in the crime. We needed as much objective evidence as we could find to confirm the truth of what Myers was now saying. Understanding the Pittman case and documenting the other demonstrably false
things Myers had asserted would strengthen our evidence.

  Vickie Pittman’s murder had been all but forgotten. Monroe County officials had reduced Myers’s and Kelly’s sentences in exchange for Myers’s testimony against Walter. How they managed to reduce sentences in the Pittman case, which was outside their jurisdiction in another county, was another anomaly. Myers insisted that there were other people besides him and Kelly involved in the Pittman murder, including a corrupt local sheriff. There were still questions about why Vickie Pittman had been killed. Myers told us that her murder had everything to do with drug debts and threats she had made to expose corruption.

  We had learned from some of the early police reports that the father of Vickie Pittman, Vic Pittman, had been implicated as a suspect in her death. Vickie Pittman had had two aunts, Mozelle and Onzelle, who had been collecting information and desperately seeking answers to the questions surrounding their niece’s death. We reached out to them on the off chance that they’d be willing to speak with us, and we were astounded when they eagerly agreed to talk.

  Mozelle and Onzelle were twin sisters—they were also colorful, opinionated talkers who could be bracingly direct. The two middle-aged, rural white women spent so much time together that they could finish each other’s sentences without even seeming to notice. They described themselves as “country tough” and presented themselves as fearless, relentless women who could not be intimidated.

  “Just so you know: We’re gun owners, so don’t bring no drama when you come.” This was Mozelle’s last warning before I hung up the phone with her the first time we talked.

  Michael and I traveled to rural Escambia County and were greeted by the twins. They invited us in, sat us at the kitchen table, and wasted no time.

  “Did your client kill our baby?” Mozelle asked bluntly.

  “No, ma’am, I sincerely believe he did not.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  I sighed. “Well, not completely. We’ve spoken to Ralph Myers and believe that he and Karen Kelly were involved, but Myers insists that there were others involved as well.”

  Mozelle looked at Onzelle and leaned back.

  “We know there’s more involved,” said Onzelle. The sisters voiced suspicions about their brother and about local law enforcement but complained that the prosecutor had disrespected and ignored them. (Vic Pittman was never formally charged for the murder.) They said they were turned away even by the state’s victims’ rights group.

  “They treated us like we were low-class white trash. They could not have cared less about us.” Mozelle looked furious as she spoke. “I thought they treated victims better. I thought we had some say.”

  Although crime victims had long complained about their treatment in the criminal justice system, by the 1980s a new movement had emerged that resulted in much more responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that not all crime victims received the same treatment.

  Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the “Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a representative of the civic authorities.

  In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional. The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. The Court prohibited jurors from hearing “victim impact” statements because they were too inflammatory and introduced arbitrariness into the capital sentencing process. Many critics argued that such evidence would ultimately disempower poor victims, victims who were racial minorities, and family members who didn’t have the resources to advocate for their deceased loved ones. The Court agreed, striking down this kind of evidence in Booth v. Maryland.

  The Court’s decision was widely criticized by prosecutors and some politicians, and it seemed to energize the victims’ rights movement. Less than three years later, the Court reversed itself in Payne v. Tennessee and upheld the rights of states to present evidence about the character of the victim in a capital sentencing trial.

  With the Supreme Court now giving its constitutional blessing to a more visible and protected role for individual victims in the criminal trial process, changes in the American criminal justice process accelerated. Millions of state and federal dollars were authorized to create advocacy groups for crime victims in each state. States found countless ways for individual victims in particular crimes to become decision makers and participants. Victims’ advocates were added to parole boards, and in most states they were given a formal role in state and local prosecutors’ offices. Victim services and outreach became critical components of the prosecutorial function. Some states made executions more accommodating of victims by increasing the number of people from the victim’s family who could watch the execution.

  State legislatures enacted harsh new punishments for crimes, naming statutes after particular victims. Megan’s Law, for example, which broadened state power to create sex offender registries, was named after Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by a man who had previously been convicted of child molestation. Instead of a faceless state or community, crime victims were featured at trial, and criminal cases took on the dynamics of a traditional civil trial, pitting the family of the victim against the offender. Press coverage hyped the personal nature of the conflict between the offender and specific victim. A new formula emerged for criminal prosecution, especially in high-profile cases, in which the emotions, perspectives, and opinions of the victim figured prominently in how criminal cases would be managed.

  However, as Mozelle and Onzelle discovered, focusing on the status of the victim became one more way for the criminal justice system to disfavor some people. Poor and minority victims of crime experienced additional victimization by the system itself. The Supreme Court’s decision in Payne appeared shortly after the Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case that presented convincing empirical evidence that the race of the victim is the greatest predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States. The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more.

  Many poor and minority victims complained that they were not getting calls or support from local police and prosecutors. Many weren’t included in the conversations about whether a plea bargain was acceptable or what sentence was appropriate. If your family had lost a loved one to murder or had to suffer the anguish of rape or serious assault, your victimization might be ignored if you had loved ones who were incarcerated. The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others
.

  More than anything else, it was the lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers that devastated Mozelle and Onzelle. “You’re the first two people to come to our house and spend time with us talking about Vickie,” Onzelle told us. After nearly three hours of hearing their heartbreaking reflections, we promised to do what we could to find out who else was involved in their niece Vickie’s death.

  We were getting to the point where, without access to police records and files, we wouldn’t be able to make more progress. Because the case was now pending on direct appeal, the State had no obligation to let us see those records and files. So we decided to file what is known as a Rule 32 petition, which would put us back in a trial court with the opportunity to present new evidence and obtain discovery, including access to the State’s files.

  Rule 32 petitions are required to include claims that were not raised at trial or on appeal and that could not have been raised at trial or on appeal. They are the vehicle to challenge a conviction based on ineffective counsel, the State’s failure to disclose evidence, and most important, new evidence of innocence. Michael and I put a petition together that asserted all of these claims, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, and filed it in the Monroe County Circuit Court.

  The document, which alleged that Walter McMillian was unfairly tried, wrongly convicted, and illegally sentenced, drew a lot of attention in Monroeville. Three years had passed since the trial. The initial confirmation of Walter’s conviction on appeal had generated significant press in the community, and most people now felt that Walter’s guilt was a settled matter. All there was left to do was wait for an execution date. Judge Key had retired, and none of the new Monroe County judges seemed to want to touch our petition, so it was transferred back to Baldwin County under the theory that the postconviction appeal should be handled in the same county as the initial trial. This made little sense to us, because a Monroe County judge had presided over the trial, but there was nothing we could do.