Summary
Chapter Two: Stand
Stevenson’s low $14,000 yearly salary meant he spent his first year and a half on Steve Bright’s couch. He then pooled his salary with Charles Bliss, someone he knew from law school, and they rented an apartment in Midtown Atlanta. Many prison conditions cases and death row cases resulted in working long hours in Alabama and driving back and forth between Alabama and Atlanta.
Prison conditions were getting worse, including prisoners being subjected to months of solitary confinement, extreme heat, cattle prods, among other methods of torturous and dangerous punishments. The SPDC received letters from prisoners and cases of prisoners found dead in their cells. One case he took involved a man, pulled over for a traffic violation, who died after being beaten by police and denied the use of his asthma inhaler. Another case: a young black man shot by police after running a red light.
One night, Stevenson is sitting outside his apartment in his parked 1975 Honda Civic, listening to Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand” on the radio when a police car approaches with its lights flashing. It is an Atlanta SWAT car. Officers point their spotlight at Stevenson, who turns off the radio. The officers are dressed in military-style black boots, pants and vests. Stevenson leaves his car and an officer draws his weapon, threatening to blow his head off if he moves. Stevenson is nervous, but he notices the officer also seems nervous. Stevenson reassures him it’s okay and says he lives here. The other officer pushes him against the car while the officers interrogate him and begin a search of the vehicle, opening the glove box, which Stevenson knows is illegal. The officer only finds a bag of peanut M&M’s, which he inspects. Eventually Stevenson asks why they did this, and they say there was a call about a burglar. They say he should be happy they’re letting him go.
Stevenson writes a complaint to the Atlanta Police Department—nine pages outlining everything that had gone wrong, citing legal cases. But what troubles him most is the moment the officer threatened to shoot. He considers whether he would have known not to run were he a sixteen-year-old boy. Eventually he meets with the deputy chief, who apologizes and promises the officers will do “extra homework on community relations,” which doesn’t reassure Stevenson. He continues to think about the situation and begins giving talks to youth groups and churches about how to deal with the presumption of guilt for poor people and people of color. At one of these meetings, an older man in a wheelchair encourages Stevenson to “beat the drum for justice.” He shows the scars he received demanding civil rights, scars which he considers medals of honor. Stevenson realizes the time has come to open the Alabama office.
Chapter Three: Trials and Tribulation
Stevenson’s narration returns to Walter McMillian’s case, stating that the Alabama investigators decided to arrest Walter based on Myers’s allegation. Myers alleged that Walter had sexually assaulted him, and since nonprocreative sex was outlawed in the state, investigators arrested Walter on the charge while building a larger case against him. On June 7, 1987, an army of officers found Walter and forced him from his truck, saying he was charged with sodomy—i.e. raping another man. Walter laughed off the charge, provoking the Sheriff Tate to threaten him with lynching while questioning him about Ronda Morrison. He denied the confusing allegations and was locked up.
Stevenson explains Myers’s account of Ronda Morrison’s murder, involving Walter abducting Myers at gunpoint, make him help drive to the cleaners because Walter’s arm was injured, committing the murder alone, and then telling Myers not to tell anyone. Law enforcement knew it would be difficult to prove, but the sodomy charge would shock the community and tarnish Walter’s reputation. They also brought Walter’s truck to the jail where Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, was being held for burglary charges. Hooks was promised release and reward money for connecting the truck to the crime scene, and so he claimed he had seen it outside the cleaners, and his testimony was used to charge Walter with capital murder in the shooting of Ronda Morrison.
The Monroe community and law enforcement were relieved someone was charged with the crime. But black residents who knew Walter found it difficult to believe. Plus, on the day of the murder, Walter and his family had held a fish fry outside Walter’s house to raise money for the local church. And earlier that morning, Walter and a mechanic friend had dismantled Walter’s truck to replace the transmission. At the reported time of the murder, dozens of people had seen Walter at his house, working on his transmission while his family members sold fish. A police officer had even stopped to buy food and noted in his log that Walter and a crowd of church folks were present. Based on the strong evidence of his alibi, people pleaded with Tate to release Walter. But Tate and the investigators stuck with the accusation. Meanwhile, Ralph Myers, after being charged in the Morrison murder himself, was having second thoughts. The favorable treatment he’d expected didn’t outweigh the consequences of admitting to involvement in a murder he didn’t commit. He went back on his allegations but police pressured Myers to produce more incriminating details. Strangely, Tate somehow managed to move Myers and Walter to death row on August 1, 1987, before they had been given a trial. The two men were put on separate floors so they couldn’t interact.
Since capital punishment had been restored in 1975, approximately one hundred prisoners in Alabama had been sentenced to execution. Most were black, though some were white, and all were poor. Housed in windowless concrete buildings, prisoners were kept in five-by-eight feet cells for twenty-three hours a day in excruciating temperatures. They trapped rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes to pass time and protect themselves.
The large, yellow-painted wooden electric chair they faced was made in the 1930s. It was called Yellow Mama. Prisoners talked about executions constantly when Walter arrived. Prisoners were haunted by the horrific botched execution of John Evans, electrocuted three times in fourteen minutes due to incorrectly fastened electrodes.
Walter had always been free and well-liked and had gotten along with people, so he felt despair at the severity of his situation: confined, taunted by racist officers, full of terror. He was unable to eat or experience anything other than fear and anguish. The white lawyer assigned by the judge to his case seemed untrustworthy and uninterested, so Walter’s family raised money through church donations and selling possessions to hire the only black criminal lawyers in the region: J.L. Chestnut and Bruce Boynton. Local law enforcement used the hiring as evidence that Walter had secretly hoarded money and wasn’t the innocent man he claimed to be. Walter despaired, and felt at times that the other prisoners were the only ones trying to help him, encouraging him to file a complaint about being illegally held on death row.
Myers, too, was sinking into an emotional crisis. The confinement and terror of executions triggered memories of his childhood abuse and burn trauma, and led him to contact Tate to say that he would say anything to be taken off death row. Tate brought Myers back to county jail immediately—ordinarily not possible without court orders and filings, but nothing about the case was ordinary. With Myers and Bill Hooks as witnesses, Walter’s case was scheduled for February 1988. Ted Pearson, the district attorney, was determined to retire from office soon, but with a victory in the prosecution of Walter McMillian.
Due to pretrial news coverage influencing jurors, Judge Key order the trial be moved to neighboring Baldwin County—a wealthy and conservative area with an atypically low black population, which Chestnut and Boynton knew would mean few black jurors. Meanwhile, Myers was having second thoughts; the trial was postponed and he was sent back to death row for refusing to cooperate as a witness because he insisted what he was meant to say was not true. Realizing he couldn’t escape the situation, Myers agreed again to testify.
The trial began in August 1988, when Walter had been on death row for over a year. The trial was short and clinical. Only one African American served on the jury. Myers told his absurd story on the stand, and Walter couldn’t believe people were taking it seriously. Bill Hooks testified he’d seen Walter’s truck outside the cleaners, as did Joe Hightower, a white man Walter had never heard of. Many more people were able to provide Walter’s fish fry alibi, but his lawyers only called three of the witnesses. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury pronounced Walter guilty.
A week later he was brought back to death row from the county jail. He insisted his chains felt tighter than they had a week earlier, when he’d been brought to the courthouse. Walter recognized one of the men driving as men who had tackled and cuffed his son at the courthouse for uttering threats after the sentencing. He felt foolish for having given everyone involved in the case the benefit of the doubt. Now he shouted that he was going to sue everyone, and that the officers needed to loosen his chains. They ignored him, and he struggled until he fell silent.
Chapter Four: The Old Rugged Cross
Chapter Four opens in February 1989, with Stevenson and Eva Ansley opening a nonprofit law center in Tuscaloosa, dedicated to providing free, quality legal services to condemned people on death row in Alabama. But there were obstacles: chief among them being the total absence of state funding. They closed a few months later and started what would be called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, in summer 1989. Their office building was a Greek Revival house built in 1882, and it came to feel like a home, after all the time they spent there, working on a flood of death row cases.
Michael Lindsey’s execution was looming. Prisoners had heard that his lawyer was a proponent of the death penalty, and this appalled them. The EJI found a twist in the case: the jury had ordered life imprisonment, while the judge had overruled with a death sentence, likely in order to appear “tough on crime” to bolster his reelection campaign. The EJI took this information to the governor, who rejected it. Lindsey was electrocuted on May 26, 1989.
Stevenson recounts the first execution he witnessed: one of his clients, Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam War veteran scarred by post-traumatic stress disorder. Herbert was one of many veterans with PTSD who was unable to readjust to society after his military service, and so wound up on death row. On the night of the execution, Herbert was calm and introduced Stevenson to his weeping wife and family. Before the execution, Stevenson was brought to a cell next to the execution chamber and saw Herbert had been shaved in order to have a “clean” execution. Now emotional, Herbert asked Stevenson to hold his hand and pray. Herbert talked about how strange the day had been: all day long people had been asking how to help him—more people had asked the question in the last fourteen hours than had asked him throughout his life. Stevenson wonders where all these helpful people were during the most difficult periods of Herbert’s life. Stevenson helped fulfill Herbert’s request to have a favorite hymn—“The Old Rugged Cross”—play during the execution.
Stevenson comments on the cloud of shame and discomfort that seemed to descend on everyone involved in the execution. The realities of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different from a belief in capital punishment. Newspaper coverage the next day neglects to contemplate the details of what killing someone actually involves, and Stevenson returns to his office with renewed energy, updating his case file plans to maximize his clients’ chances of avoiding execution.
Analysis
In the second chapter, Stevenson’s harassment by Atlanta police provides a first-hand encounter with racial injustice and racial profiling. The incident highlights for Stevenson the deep levels of distrust and fear among white law enforcement when dealing with black men. The incident inspires him to give talks to youth groups and churches about the presumption of guilt for poor people and people of color, which is another of the book’s themes.
The injustice of Walter’s case is further highlighted when law enforcement arrest him for the spurious charge of raping Ralph Myers, and Sheriff Tate threatens Walter with lynching, a historical terror tactic in which white southerners hanged black people in public.
Though there is strong evidence of Walter’s innocence, due to his multiple-witness alibi and the illogic in Myers’s story, the State sticks with the unjust charge. Bizarrely, Tate puts Myers and Walter on death row before trial, which sheds light on the sheriff’s corrupt power and the unfairness of the legal system. The theme of inhumane prison conditions is introduced: prisoners on death row are confined to box-like cells and traumatized by the smell of flesh burning in the electric chair. These conditions are wielded by Tate as a form of torture against Myers, who agrees to testify against Walter in exchange for being taken off death row.
More racial injustice in Walter’s case arises when the judge orders the trial be moved to a neighboring county with an atypically low black population, which means the jury is less likely to be black and therefore feel sympathy for a black defendant. The majority-white jury convicts him with little deliberation.
Stevenson introduces the theme of the inhumanity of the death penalty when he recounts witnessing Herbert Richardson’s execution, highlighting the grotesque ritual of systemically killing a person with the imagery of Herbert’s shaved body. Despite the brutality of the execution and the EJI’s inability to stop it, Stevenson’s reflections renew his energy to continue fighting for his condemned clients. This moment introduces the theme of hope and resilience despite setbacks and despair.
