Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals is the state appellate court at the center of two sharply contrasting stages in Walter McMillian’s case: it initially affirmed his conviction and death sentence, then later overturned both and ordered a new trial. Its rulings show the practical weight of appellate review in capital cases, while the court’s handling of Marsha Colbey’s appeal also illustrates the limits of its role within a larger state judicial process.

Appellate Role and Setting

The court reviewed McMillian’s conviction and death sentence after his trial in Monroe County. Capital appeals were managed by the Alabama Attorney General’s Office rather than by the local district attorney, so an assistant attorney general presented the State’s position before the appellate judges. At the oral argument, the State characterized the case as a routine capital murder prosecution and maintained that the death sentence had been properly imposed. The appeal therefore placed the trial record and the State’s defense of it before a court distinct from the local officials who had pursued the prosecution.

The court sat in the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. Its grand appellate courtroom had once been a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple; the building, constructed in the 1920s, was renovated as a courthouse in the 1940s. The setting carried a dense political history. Across the street stood Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott; nearby, the state capitol displayed the Confederate battle flag alongside the American and Alabama flags. The account sets the court’s proceedings amid these visible traces of the state’s racial history, without treating the building itself as an explanation for any particular ruling.

At the time of McMillian’s oral argument, the court’s chief judge was John Patterson, the former governor whose political career had been marked by fierce opposition to civil rights and racial integration. He had defeated George Wallace in 1958 with Ku Klux Klan backing, banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama while attorney general, and, as governor, withheld police protection from the Freedom Riders. During the appellate argument, Patterson asked McMillian’s lawyer where he was from. The lawyer answered that he lived in Montgomery. The exchange was brief, but the account places it against Patterson’s record and the racial inequalities that the appeal challenged.

McMillian’s First Appeal

The first appeal raised a broad set of objections to the conviction. Bryan Stevenson argued that the evidence was insufficient, that Ralph Myers’s testimony lacked credible corroboration, and that Alabama law did not permit a murder conviction to rest exclusively on an accomplice’s testimony. He also challenged prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and the change of venue. Finally, he contested Judge R. E. L. Key’s decision to override the jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment and impose death. Stevenson regarded even a life sentence without parole for an innocent person as a grave injustice, but argued that the death sentence compounded the error.

The court rejected every argument in its seventy-page opinion affirming the conviction and death sentence. Stevenson had entered the oral argument hopeful: the five judges asked few questions, and he interpreted their silence as a possible sign that the case offered little support for the conviction. Patterson’s question about where he came from was the chief judge’s only remark. Stevenson later regretted discouraging McMillian’s family from attending. He had believed the legal issues were technical and that the family would have to travel a long distance for a short argument; after sitting down, he wished the court had seen sympathetic supporters in the room.

The result was especially difficult because the challenge to Myers’s testimony concerned a concrete legal safeguard: state law required credible corroboration of accomplice testimony in a murder case. Stevenson believed the absence of such corroboration made affirmance untenable. After the ruling, he drove to the prison to tell McMillian. McMillian had been prepared for a prolonged fight but had allowed himself to hope. He responded that officials knew he had not committed the murder but could not admit their mistake. The appeal had ended against him, leaving the conviction and death sentence in force at that stage.

Reversal and a New Trial

The court later reached a different result after the Alabama Bureau of Investigation report in McMillian’s case. On February 23, nearly six weeks after receiving the report, Stevenson learned from the court clerk that the judges had ruled and that he could collect the opinion. He hurried to the courthouse and read the thirty-five-page decision. This time, the court ruled for McMillian on every other claim and invalidated both his conviction and his death sentence, ordering a new trial.

The decision was consequential but limited. The court did not find that McMillian was innocent, nor did it order his immediate release; it granted a new trial. Stevenson recognized how much he had feared another loss only after reading the ruling. He drove to death row to deliver the news in person. McMillian listened, leaned back, and answered with measured relief that it was good news. The contrast with the first appeal is central to the court’s place in the case: appellate review first left the judgment intact, then provided the procedural opening that made a retrial possible.

Other Appeals and Institutional Limits

The court also affirmed Marsha Colbey’s conviction and sentence. Colbey had been prosecuted after her infant’s death and was serving a life sentence. Her legal team sought review in the Alabama Supreme Court after the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the judgment. The state supreme court granted a new trial because the trial judge had refused to exclude prospective jurors who were biased and could not be impartial. The distinction matters: Colbey’s appellate relief came from the Alabama Supreme Court, not from a reversal by the Court of Criminal Appeals. After the new-trial ruling, local officials threatened to prosecute her again; expert pathologists helped establish that there was no basis to convict her of murder. She was eventually freed in December 2012, after ten years of wrongful imprisonment and a further dispute over credit for time served.

Taken together, these cases present the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals as neither a simple instrument of correction nor an endpoint beyond further review. Its first decision in McMillian’s case sustained a sentence challenged on evidentiary and procedural grounds; its later decision set aside that judgment and required a new trial. In Colbey’s case, it affirmed a conviction that the state supreme court subsequently reopened. The court’s significance in this account lies in those consequential decisions and in the appellate process’s boundaries: a ruling could preserve a judgment, undo one, or leave the next step to another court, without by itself resolving every question of innocence, responsibility, or release.