Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

  After Woodrow Ikner completed his testimony, it was deep into the afternoon. The judge looked at the clock and called it a day. I wanted to keep going, to continue until midnight if necessary, but I realized that that wasn’t going to happen. I walked over to Walter.

  “We have to stop now?” he asked worriedly.

  “Yes, but we’ll just pick up and keep going tomorrow morning.” I smiled at him, and I was pleased when he smiled back.

  Walter looked at me excitedly. “Man, I can’t tell you how I’m feeling right now. All this time I’ve been waiting for the truth and been hearing nothing but lies. Right now feels incredible. I just—” A uniformed deputy walked over and interrupted us.

  “We need to take him back to the holding cell, you’ll have to talk there.” The middle-aged white officer seemed provoked. I didn’t pay it much attention and told Walter I’d come down later.

  As people filed out of the courtroom you could see hope growing among Walter’s family. They came up to me and gave me hugs. Walter’s sister Armelia, his wife Minnie, and his nephew Giles were all talking excitedly about the evidence we’d presented.

  When we got back to the hotel, Michael was pumped up, too. “Chapman should just call you and say he wants to drop the charges against Walter and let him go home.”

  “Let’s not hold our breath waiting for that call,” I replied.

  Chapman had seemed troubled as we left the courthouse. I still had some hope that he might turn around on this and even help us, but we definitely couldn’t plan on that.

  I arrived at the courthouse early the next morning to visit Walter in his basement cell before the proceedings began. When I headed upstairs, I was confused to see a throng of black folks sitting outside the courtroom in the courthouse lobby. It was just about time for the proceedings to begin. I went up to Armelia, who was sitting with the others outside the courtroom, and she looked at me with concern.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why aren’t y’all inside the courtroom?”

  I looked around the lobby. If there had been a huge crowd yesterday, today’s hearing had brought more people, including several clergy members and older people of color I’d never seen before.

  “They won’t let us in, Mr. Stevenson.”

  “What do you mean they won’t let you in?”

  “We tried to go in earlier, and they told us we couldn’t come in.”

  A young man in a deputy sheriff’s uniform was standing in front of the entrance to the courtroom. I walked over to him and he put his arm up to stop me.

  “I want to go into the courtroom,” I said firmly.

  “You can’t come in.”

  “What do you mean I can’t come in? There is a hearing scheduled and I want to go inside.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come into the courtroom.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  He stood there silently. Finally, I added, “I’m the defense attorney. I think I have to be able to go inside the courtroom.”

  He looked at me closely and was clearly perplexed. “Um, I don’t know. I’ll have to go and check.” He disappeared inside the courtroom. He came back a few moments later and grinned at me tentatively. “Um, you can come in.”

  I pushed by the deputy, opened the door, and saw that the entire courtroom had been altered. Inside the courtroom door they had placed a large metal detector, on the other side of which was an enormous German shepherd held back by a police officer. The courtroom was already half filled. The benches that had been filled by Walter’s supporters the previous day were now mostly occupied by older white people. Clearly the people here were supporting the Morrisons and the prosecution. Chapman and Valeska were already sitting at the prosecutor’s table, acting as if nothing was going on. I was livid.

  I walked over to Chapman, “Who told the deputies not to let the folks outside come into the courtroom?” I asked. They looked at me as if they didn’t know what I was talking about. “I’m going to speak to the judge about this.”

  I spun on my heel and went directly to the judge’s chambers, and the prosecutors followed me. When I explained to Judge Norton that McMillian’s family and supporters had been told that they couldn’t come into the courtroom, even though the State’s supporters had been let in, the judge rolled his eyes and looked annoyed.

  “Mr. Stevenson, your people will just have to get here earlier,” he said dismissively.

  “Judge, the problem isn’t that they weren’t here early. The problem is they were told they couldn’t come into the courtroom.”

  “No one is being denied entrance to the courtroom, Mr. Stevenson.”

  He turned to his bailiff, who left the room. I followed the bailiff and saw him whisper something to the deputy outside the courtroom. McMillian’s supporters would be let into the courtroom—now that half the courtroom was already filled.

  I walked over to where two ministers had assembled all of Walter’s supporters and tried to explain the situation.

  “I’m sorry, everyone,” I said. “They’ve done something really inappropriate today. They’ll let you in now, but the courtroom is already half filled with people here to support the State. There won’t be enough seats for everyone.”

  One of the ministers, a heavyset African American man dressed in a dark suit with a large cross around his neck, walked over to me. “Mr. Stevenson, it’s okay. Please don’t worry about us. We’ll have a few people be our representatives today and we will be here even earlier tomorrow. We won’t let nobody turn us around, sir.”

  The ministers began selecting people to be representatives in the courtroom. They told Minnie, Armelia, Walter’s children, and several others to go on in. When the ministers called out Mrs. Williams, everyone seemed to smile. Mrs. Williams, an older black woman, stood up and prepared herself to enter the courtroom. She took great care in fixing her hair just right. On top of her gray hair she wore a small hat whose placement she precisely adjusted. She then pulled out a long blue scarf that she delicately wrapped around her neck. Only then did she slowly begin to make her way to the courtroom door where the line of McMillian supporters had formed. I found her dignified ritual riveting, but when the spell was broken I realized that I needed to get going myself. I hadn’t spent the morning preparing for witnesses as I had intended but had instead been drawn into this foolish mistreatment of McMillian’s supporters. I walked past the line of patient people and went inside to begin preparing for the hearing.

  I was standing at counsel’s table when out of the corner of my eye I saw that Mrs. Williams had made it to the courtroom door. She was quite elegant in her hat and scarf. She wasn’t a large woman, but there was something commanding about her presence—I couldn’t help but watch her as she moved carefully through the doorway toward the metal detector. She walked more slowly than everyone else, but she held her head high with an undeniable grace and dignity. She reminded me of older women I’d been around all my life—women whose lives were hard but who remained kind and dedicated themselves to building and sustaining their communities. Mrs. Williams glanced at the available rows to see where she would sit, and then turned to walk through the metal detector—and that’s when she saw the dog.

  I watched all her composure fall away, replaced by a look of absolute fear. Her shoulders dropped, her body sagged, and she seemed paralyzed. For over a minute she stood there, frozen, and then her body began to tremble and then shake noticeably. I heard her groan. Tears were running down her face and she began to shake her head sadly. I kept watching until she turned around and quickly walked out of the courtroom.

  I felt my own mood shift. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Mrs. Williams, but I knew that here in Alabama, police dogs and black folks looking for justice had never mixed well.

  I was trying to shake off the dark feeling that the morning’s events had conjured when the officers brought Walter into the courtroom. Because there was no jury, the judge had not permitted me to give him street clothes to
wear, so Walter was wearing his prison uniform. They allowed him to be in the courtroom without handcuffs but had insisted on keeping his ankles shackled. Michael and I conferred briefly about the order of witnesses as the rest of McMillian’s family and supporters slowly filed through the metal detector, past the dog, and into the courtroom.

  Despite the State’s early-morning maneuvers and the bad omen of the dog and Mrs. Williams, we had another good day in court. Evidence from the state mental health workers who had dealt with Myers after he initially refused to testify in the first trial and was sent to the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility for evaluation confirmed Myers’s testimony from the day before. Dr. Omar Mohabbat explained that Myers had told him then “that the police had framed him to accept the penalty for the murder case that he is accused of or ‘to testify’ that ‘the man did.’ ” Mohabbat reported that Myers “categorically denied having anything to do with the alleged crime. He claimed, ‘I don’t know the name of this girl, I don’t know the time of the alleged crime, I don’t know the date of the alleged crime, I don’t know the place of the alleged crime.’ ” Mohabbat testified that Myers had told him, “They told me to say what they wanted me to say.”

  Evidence from other doctors further confirmed this testimony. Dr. Norman Poythress from Taylor Hardin explained that Myers had told him that “his prior ‘confessions’ are bogus and were coerced out of him by the police through keeping him physically and psychologically isolated.”

  We presented evidence from Taylor Hardin staffer Dr. Kamal Nagi, who said that Myers had told him of “another murder that occurred in 1986 where a girl was shot in the Laundromat. [He] said that the ‘police and also my lawyer want me to say that I had driven these people to the Laundromat and they shot the girl, but I won’t do it.’ ” Myers also told Nagi, “They threatened me. They want me to say what they want to hear and if I don’t then they tell me, ‘You’re going to the electric chair.’ ”

  We had evidence from a fourth doctor to whom Myers confided that he was being pressured to give false testimony against Walter McMillian. Dr. Bernard Bryant testified that Myers told him “he did not commit the crime and that at the time he was incarcerated for the crime, he was threatened and harassed by the local police authorities into confessing he committed a crime.”

  We emphasized to the court throughout the day’s hearing that all of these statements were made by Myers before the initial trial. Not only did these statements make Myers’s recantation more credible but they had also been documented in medical records that had never been turned over to Walter’s trial lawyers, as the law required. The U.S. Supreme Court has long required that the prosecution disclose to the defendant anything that is exculpatory or that may be helpful to the defendant in impeaching a witness.

  The supporters whom the State had brought to court and the victim’s family seemed confused by the evidence we were presenting—it complicated the simple narrative they had fully embraced about Walter’s guilt and the need for swift and certain punishment. State supporters began to leave the courtroom as the day went on, and the number of black people who were let into the room grew. By the end of that second day, I felt very hopeful. We had maintained a good pace and the cross-examinations had been shorter than I had expected. I thought we could finish our case in one more day.

  I was tired but feeling pleased as I walked to my car that evening. To my surprise, I noticed Mrs. Williams sitting outside the courthouse on a bench, alone. She stood when our eyes met. I walked over, remembering how unsettled I had been to see her leave the courtroom.

  “Mrs. Williams, I’m so sorry they did what they did this morning. They should not have done it, and I’m sorry if they upset you. But, so you know, things went well today. I feel like we had a good day—”

  “Attorney Stevenson, I feel so bad. I feel so bad,” she said and grabbed my hands.

  “I should have come into that courtroom this morning. I was supposed to be in that courtroom this morning,” she said and began to weep.

  “Mrs. Williams, it’s all right,” I said. “They shouldn’t have done what they did. Please don’t worry about it.” I put my arm around her and gave her a hug.

  “No, no, no, Attorney Stevenson. I was meant to be in that courtroom, I was supposed to be in that courtroom.”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Williams, it’s okay.”

  “No, sir, I was supposed to be there and I wanted to be there. I tried, I tried, Lord knows I tried, Mr. Stevenson. But when I saw that dog—” She shook her head and stared away with a distant look. “When I saw that dog, I thought about 1965, when we gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and tried to march for our voting rights. They beat us and put those dogs on us.” She looked back to me sadly. “I tried to move, Attorney Stevenson, I wanted to move, but I just couldn’t do it.”

  As she spoke it seemed like a world of sadness surrounded her. She let go of my hand and walked away. I watched her get into a car with some other people I had seen in the courtroom earlier.

  I drove back to the motel in a more somber mood to start preparing for the last day of hearings.

  I arrived at the court early the next morning to make sure there were no problems. As it turned out, very few people showed up to support the State. And though the metal detector and the dog were still there, no deputy stood at the door to block black people from entering the courtroom. Inside the courtroom, I noticed one of the women I’d seen leave with Mrs. Williams the night before. She came up to me and introduced herself as Mrs. Williams’s daughter. She thanked me for trying to console her mother.

  “When she got home last night, she was so upset. She didn’t eat anything, she didn’t speak to anybody, she just went to her bedroom. We could hear her praying all night long. This morning she called the Reverend and begged him for another chance to be a community representative at the hearing. She was up when I got out of bed, dressed and ready to come to court. I told her she didn’t have to come, but she wouldn’t hear none of it. She’s been through a lot and, well, on the trip down here she just kept saying over and over, ‘Lord, I can’t be scared of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.’ ”

  I was apologizing again to the daughter for what the court officials had done the day before when suddenly there was a commotion at the courtroom door. We both looked up and there stood Mrs. Williams. She was once again dressed impeccably in her scarf and hat. She held her handbag tight at her side and seemed to be swaying at the entrance. I could hear her speaking to herself, repeating over and over again: “I ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” I watched as the officers allowed her to move forward. She held her head up as she walked slowly through the metal detector, repeating over and over, “I ain’t scared of no dog.” It was impossible to look away. She made it through the detector and stared at the dog. Then, loud enough for everyone to hear, she belted out: “I ain’t scared of no dog!”

  She moved past the dog and walked into the courtroom. Black folks who were already inside beamed with joy as she passed them. She sat down near the front of the courtroom and turned to me with a broad smile and announced, “Attorney Stevenson, I’m here!”

  “Mrs. Williams, it’s so good to see you here. Thank you for coming.”

  The courtroom filled up, and I started getting my papers together. They brought Walter into the courtroom, the signal that the hearing was about to begin. That’s when I heard Mrs. Williams call my name.

  “No, Attorney Stevenson, you didn’t hear me. I said I’m here.” She spoke very loudly, and I was a little confused and embarrassed. I turned around and smiled at her.

  “No, Mrs. Williams, I did hear you, and I’m so glad you’re here.” When I looked at her, though, it was as if she was in her own world.

  The courtroom was packed, and the bailiff brought the court to order as the judge walked in. Everyone rose, as is the custom. When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long
pause as we all waited for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” People chuckled nervously as she took her seat, but when she looked at me, I saw tears in her eyes.

  In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition. I smiled now, because I knew she was saying to the room, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.”

  I smiled at Mrs. Williams while she sat proudly. For the first time since I started working on the case, everything we were struggling to achieve finally seemed to make sense. It took me a minute to realize that the judge was calling my name, impatiently asking me to begin.

  The last day of hearings went well. There were a half-dozen people who had been jailed or imprisoned with Ralph Myers whom Ralph had told he was being pressured to give false testimony against Walter McMillian. We found most of them and had them testify. They were consistent in what they related. Isaac Dailey, who had been falsely accused by Myers of committing the Pittman murder, explained how Myers had falsely implicated Walter in the Pittman crime. Myers had confided to Dailey after he was arrested that he and Karen had discussed pinning the Pittman murder on Walter. “He related to us that he and Karen did the killing and, ah, plotted together to put it off on Johnny D.”