Bryan Stevenson and Michael O’Connor’s investigative partnership

Bryan Stevenson and Michael O’Connor’s investigative partnership took shape around the effort to free Walter McMillian. O’Connor joined Stevenson’s organization after overcoming heroin addiction and rebuilding his life, then moved to Montgomery and plunged into a case whose central witnesses and official record demanded relentless scrutiny. Their work produced new evidence about the State’s witnesses and led them to Ralph Myers, whose account might change the case but could not safely be accepted at face value.

O’Connor Joins the Investigation

By the time Stevenson could hire additional lawyers, the McMillian case had become an intensive investigation as well as a legal appeal. Michael O’Connor, a recent Yale Law School graduate, brought a personal history markedly different from the credentials on his résumé. Raised in a working-class neighborhood outside Philadelphia, he began using hard drugs with high-school friends and developed a heroin addiction. Years of dependency and instability included the risk of overdose; the death of a close friend helped prompt his return to sobriety. His family had stayed with him through the crisis, helping him stabilize and return to college. At Penn State, he excelled, graduating summa cum laude before entering Yale Law School.

During his job interview, O’Connor apologized for the darker parts of his past. Stevenson regarded him as an especially good fit for the staff he hoped to build, not as someone whose history disqualified him from the work. O’Connor signed on, moved to Montgomery, and entered the McMillian investigation without hesitation. The account presents his recovery not as a substitute for legal skill—his academic record was formidable—but as part of the experience that kept his attention connected to people living through crisis.

Shared Work on the McMillian Case

The two lawyers spent days following leads, interviewing dozens of people, pursuing rumors, and testing competing theories. Stevenson increasingly believed they would need to identify the actual killer of Ronda Morrison to secure McMillian’s release. O’Connor’s contribution was practical and sustained: he did not simply join the case as additional counsel but shared its investigative labor, including the uncertain work of deciding which leads deserved further attention. Stevenson valued both O’Connor’s help and the presence of someone with whom to share the strain of a case that seemed to grow more complicated as they learned more.

Their investigation uncovered documentary evidence undermining Bill Hooks’s testimony that he had seen McMillian’s truck at the cleaners on the day of the murder. County financial records showed that Sheriff Tate had paid Hooks close to $5,000 in reward money and expenses, as well as money for travel in and out of the county around the time of trial. The payments mattered not merely as suspicious background: they were information that should have been disclosed to the defense so Hooks’s credibility could be challenged.

The lawyers also found records showing that Hooks had been released from jail immediately after giving police his statement. The district attorney and sheriff had also obtained the dismissal of city charges and fines against him, although they had no authority in city courts. Under the governing precedent described in the account, the State had to disclose that benefit in exchange for cooperation. It had not. The partnership’s investigation therefore turned scattered records into a specific challenge to the reliability of the prosecution’s case and to the State’s failure to provide the defense with favorable information.

Approaching Myers with Caution

The investigation widened when Myers, imprisoned at St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, contacted Stevenson and asked him to visit. Stevenson and O’Connor arranged to meet him three days later. Before the visit, the two men ran several miles in the evenings to unwind from increasingly long workdays; during one run, they debated why Myers had reached out and whether his new account could be trusted. O’Connor focused on the extraordinary stakes of Myers’s testimony: it had helped place an innocent man on death row. Stevenson considered the possibility that Myers had been pressured and also worried that the State might be setting a trap. They agreed to hear him while avoiding giving him information he did not already possess.

That caution reflected the structure of the case. Hooks’s testimony had become vulnerable because of new alibi evidence, information about the condition of McMillian’s truck, and the payments and favors the lawyers had uncovered. Myers’s testimony, however, had formed the basis of the State’s case. A recantation could therefore matter far more, but only if the lawyers could assess what Myers said without supplying him with details or mistaking a dramatic new story for reliable evidence.

The visit itself began with the realities of prison procedure. Stevenson and O’Connor drove two hours to the rural maximum-security prison, passed through security, descended a corridor and stairs, and were admitted through multiple metal doors into the visitation room. They set down their notepads and pens and paced while they waited. Myers appeared older and physically smaller than Stevenson had expected; when he saw O’Connor, he stopped and objected nervously to the unexpected presence of another visitor. The scene put the contrast between the immense consequences of Myers’s testimony and the ordinary, constrained setting of the interview into sharp relief.

Following the Leads Beyond the Interview

On the drive back, Stevenson and O’Connor debated how much of Myers’s account they could believe. His explanation for his role in the McMillian case seemed plausible to them: his trial testimony had been so implausible that pressure to testify falsely was possible. His broader allegations were harder to evaluate. Myers claimed that he had committed the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman under another sheriff’s direction and described a far-reaching conspiracy involving police, drug dealing, and money laundering. The lawyers did not treat the scale or confidence of the claim as proof. They spent weeks following up the leads he provided.

Myers told them that he had never met McMillian and knew of him only through Karen Kelly. He also confirmed that he had spent time with Kelly and said she had been involved in the Pittman murder. Stevenson and O’Connor decided to check this account directly with Kelly, who was serving a ten-year sentence at Tutwiler Prison for Women. In the interview room, Kelly declared that McMillian had been framed and confirmed that Myers had not known him before the Morrison murder. The partnership’s method thus moved from one witness to another: they treated Myers’s statements as leads to verify, not as conclusions to adopt.

The surviving account of the collaboration centers on investigation rather than a formal division of duties. It records O’Connor’s biography, his arrival, the pair’s joint searches and interviews, their scrutiny of Hooks’s treatment by officials, and their careful pursuit of Myers and Kelly. Stevenson’s gratitude for having someone share the case’s intensity makes the partnership’s human dimension explicit, while the detail of their work shows what that companionship enabled: a more sustained effort to test the State’s evidence and investigate what had actually happened.