Baldwin County, Alabama, was the court-selected venue for Walter McMillian’s trial after the judge granted a change of venue from Monroe County. The transfer was presented as a response to intense publicity, but the county’s sharply different racial makeup and conservative politics made it a decision with grave consequences for McMillian’s prospects before a jury.

County Setting

In the comparison offered to the court, Baldwin County stood apart from the neighboring counties around Monroe County. Wilcox County was 72 percent Black, Conecuh County 46 percent, Clarke County 45 percent, Butler County 42 percent, and Escambia County 32 percent. Baldwin County, to the south, was affluent and had an African American population of just 9 percent. Its Gulf beaches marked a contrast in landscape; its demographics marked a more consequential contrast for a trial whose defendant was Black.

The county seat, Bay Minette, was the town where McMillian’s case would be heard. The choice placed the trial not merely in a different community, but in one where the lawyers anticipated a far smaller pool of Black potential jurors than in Monroe County or several of its neighbors.

Selection as the Trial Venue

Ted Pearson, the district attorney, agreed that the trial should be moved because of extraordinary pretrial coverage of the Ronda Morrison murder. Judge R. E. L. Key granted the defense motion. When the judge proposed a neighboring county so witnesses would not have to travel far, McMillian’s lawyers, J. L. Chestnut and Bruce Boynton, had reason to hope: most neighboring counties had substantial Black populations.

The judge made the choice quickly. He announced, “We’ll go to Baldwin County.” Chestnut and Boynton objected at once, then tried to withdraw their motion. Judge Key replied that he could not authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused. The reasoning treated the transfer as a remedy for prejudgment, but it left the defense facing a different and, in its view, more damaging disadvantage: a venue where Black representation on the jury was expected to be scarce.

Race, Juries, and Local Politics

The concern was part of a wider Alabama pattern, not simply a prediction about one county. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, even though sixteen counties had Black majorities. Legislative arrangements had also preserved white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. Pearson had heard Black residents say they believed McMillian was innocent, but he remained confident he could obtain a guilty verdict despite their doubts and the weaknesses in the prosecution’s witnesses.

Jury selection had long offered prosecutors a means of excluding Black people even where formal racial exclusion was unconstitutional. Jury rolls drawn from voting lists, administrative practices, and discretionary peremptory strikes had all helped sustain largely white juries. Earlier Supreme Court rulings had condemned exclusion by race, but the standard for challenging discriminatory peremptory strikes remained so difficult to meet that the practice continued. In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made challenges to racially discriminatory strikes more direct, while also prompting prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. Baldwin County’s 9 percent Black population made the defense’s concern about jury composition immediate and concrete.

Consequences for McMillian’s Trial

Chestnut and Boynton understood the transfer as disastrous for McMillian. They expected very few, if any, Black jurors and viewed Baldwin County as exceptionally conservative, having made less progress in leaving behind Jim Crow racial politics than neighboring counties. The change therefore altered the conditions under which the evidence would be judged, even before the trial began.

McMillian, who had heard death-row prisoners warn him about all-white juries, was worried, but he still trusted the strength of his alibi. He believed that nearly a dozen witnesses could account for his whereabouts and that no jury, Black or white, could accept Ralph Myers’s implausible account. That confidence collided with the setting chosen for the trial: a venue where the defense feared racial imbalance and where the prosecution believed it could win despite doubts about its case.

Significance

Baldwin County’s role in the narrative is defined by the gap between the stated purpose of a venue change and its practical effect. Moving a highly publicized case could be defended as protecting fairness, yet selecting the affluent county with the smallest Black population among the neighboring options intensified the threat of an all-white jury. The county thus becomes more than a place on the map: it is the setting in which geography, jury selection, and the racial politics of Alabama’s courts converged against McMillian.