Judge R. E. L. Key

Judge R. E. L. Key is identified in the account through one consequential act: after Walter McMillian’s jury returned a verdict of life imprisonment without parole, Key overrode it and imposed the death penalty. The intervention placed McMillian on death row and, in the narrator’s retrospective account, brought the case to the attention of the lawyers who would work to free him. Key’s significance lies less in a developed personal portrait than in the reach of this judicial decision: it altered the sentence, the case’s visibility, and the course of McMillian’s life.

The Sentencing Decision

The account gives no explanation of Key’s reasoning or description of his wider judicial career. It does establish the contrast at the center of his role: the jury’s verdict was life imprisonment without parole, but Key imposed death instead. The narrator later recalled that without this override, McMillian likely would have spent the rest of his life in prison and died there. The sentence thus functioned both as an extreme punishment and as the circumstance that brought the case to the advocates’ attention.

The Courtroom in Its Racial Context

Key’s decision is situated within a broader account of Alabama’s criminal courts, not attributed to a stated racial motive. In 1987, all forty of the state’s elected district attorneys were white, despite sixteen majority-black counties. The account also describes the persistence of all-white juries and the use of discretionary peremptory strikes to exclude Black prospective jurors; the 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky offered a means to challenge discriminatory strikes but did not erase that history. This context frames the power exercised in McMillian’s sentencing, while the available evidence does not establish the jury’s racial composition or Key’s reasoning in the case.

Consequences and Narrative Role

Years later, McMillian stood in court as both he and the State sought dismissal of the charges. The judge granted the motion, and McMillian was pronounced free. Looking back at that release, the narrator connected the case’s discovery to Key’s earlier override and drew attention to the disparity between how readily an innocent man had been convicted and how difficult it had been to win his freedom. Key therefore occupies a sharply defined place in the narrative: his sentence intensified the injustice, but also made the case impossible for its eventual advocates to overlook.