'Just Mercy': The true story of Walter McMillan's wrongful murder conviction and Bryan Stevenson delivering him from death row
There are many stories of hardship and struggle worth telling. But ‘Just Mercy’ is especially an important one. The upcoming American legal drama, starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall and Brie Larson, tells the true story of Walter McMillian, who with the help of young defense attorney Bryan Stevenson appeals his murder conviction.
It is an adaptation of Stevenson’s book 'Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption'. To understand the criminal justice system in America, its bias against African American men and the death penalty, it is important to understand the stories of both McMillan and Stevenson.
Walter McMillian
McMillian (Jamie Foxx) was an African-American pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of 18-year-old Ronda Morrison, a white dry-cleaning clerk. Despite insisting he was at a church fish dry with dozens of witnesses, including a police officer, he was seen as a suspect.
McMillian had no prior felony convictions and was arrested by a newly-elected Sheriff, Tom Tate. He was arrested in June 1987, and oddly in what the New York Times called "an extraordinary move, was immediately sent to Alabama's Death Row", without having stood trial.
McMillian awaited trial for the next 15 months, which was relocated from Monroe County, an area that was 40 percent black, to Baldwin County where 86 percent of the residents were white.
The trial began August 15, 1988, and lasted only a day and a half. On August 17, 1988, a jury of eleven white people and one African-American person found McMillian guilty of "the capital offense charged in the indictment".
The jury recommended a life sentence, after ignoring multiple alibi defense witnesses (who were black), and despite the lack of physical evidence implicating McMillian. However, on September 19, 1988, Judge Robert E. Lee Key, Jr., according to the National Registry of Exonerations, overrode the jury’s recommendation and imposed the death penalty. Following his death penalty sentence, Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) took on McMillian’s case.
Bryan Stevenson
Stevenson took on McMillan’s case in postconviction. He showed the State’s witnesses had lied on the stand and the prosecution had “illegally suppressed exculpatory evidence”.
McMillian’s conviction and death sentence were affirmed on appeal in 1991. Stevenson, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, filed a petition for a new trial alleging various constitutional violations.
In pursuing those claims, the attorneys obtained the original recording of Ralph Myers’ confession, who said he drove McMillian to the scene of the crime and that McMillian went into the building alone. After listening to it, they flipped the tape over and discovered a recorded conversation in which Myers complained bitterly that he was being forced to implicate McMillian, whom he did not know, for a crime neither of them had any role in.
McMillian's conviction was overturned by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in 1993 and prosecutors agreed the case was mishandled. McMillian was released in 1993 after spending six years on death row for a crime he did not commit.
Stevenson later founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization, based in Montgomery, Alabama, that provides legal representation to prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes and those who may have been denied a fair trial. The Equal Justice Initiative, according to its website, “is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”
'Just Mercy' premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival September 6, followed by a theatrical release December 25.
