Montgomery, Alabama, where McMillian’s appeal was argued, is presented as more than a state-government address: it is the appellate destination reached by long drives from McMillian’s community, and a city where a courthouse stood amid visible reminders of Alabama’s racial past. There, Bryan Stevenson argued that Walter McMillian’s conviction and death sentence could not stand; the court nevertheless affirmed both. The city’s physical setting, its institutional history, and its distance from the people who supported McMillian all give it a central place in the account of the appeal.

A distant center of legal action

The appeal connected Montgomery to Monroeville, where McMillian’s case and family were rooted. Stevenson’s work required repeated drives between the two places. After a visit with McMillian’s family, he dropped Minnie and Jackie at their house and faced a journey of at least two hours back to Montgomery. The distance was not incidental: the legal proceedings took place far from the community whose members knew McMillian and were following the case.

The travel continued as the appeal advanced. After reconsideration was denied, Stevenson returned to the problem of preparing the appellate brief, which was due in twenty-eight days. On drives between Monroeville and Montgomery, the surrounding farmland, cotton fields, and hills prompted him to consider the region’s history and the unequal security experienced by McMillian’s family and other Black residents. The route therefore linked urgent legal deadlines to a wider landscape shaped by racial hierarchy and fear.

The appellate courthouse and its setting

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals heard the argument in the Alabama Judicial Building, at the end of Dexter Avenue. The building had been constructed in the 1920s as a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple and renovated into a courthouse in the 1940s. Its marble floors, cavernous courtroom, and domed ceiling made the appeal’s institutional setting imposing; it was a space designed to convey the authority of the state.

The building’s surroundings made that authority inseparable from civic memory. Across the street stood Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away, the state capitol displayed the American flag, Alabama’s state flag, and the Confederate battle flag. In Stevenson’s account, these nearby landmarks do not erase one another: the place associated with civil-rights organizing and the symbols of the Confederacy occupy the same civic landscape.

The chief judge of the appellate court was John Patterson, a former governor whose public record included fierce opposition to civil rights and racial integration. He had defeated George Wallace in 1958 with Ku Klux Klan backing; as attorney general and governor, he had also opposed civil-rights organizations and protests and withheld police protection from Freedom Riders traveling through Alabama. His presence at the head of the court placed the appeal within a history that was not merely architectural or symbolic, but also institutional.

Race, juries, and the legal context

The appeal arose against a statewide legal background in which formal rules against racial exclusion had not ensured equal participation. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, including in a state with sixteen majority-Black counties. Legislative arrangements had also helped preserve white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. These conditions formed part of the context in which a Black defendant’s case moved through Alabama’s courts.

Jury selection offered another measure of the distance between constitutional guarantees and courtroom practice. Although the Supreme Court had long barred exclusion from jury service on racial grounds, jury rolls and selection practices remained ways to keep Black people from serving. For years, the standard for challenging discriminatory peremptory strikes had been so difficult to meet that the practice of striking all or nearly all Black prospective jurors persisted. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made such challenges more direct, but also prompted prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. In a death-penalty case, the possibility of an all-white jury remained a substantial concern.

The argument and its aftermath

Stevenson argued that the evidence against McMillian was insufficient and that Ralph Myers’s testimony lacked credible corroboration. He also raised prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, an improper change of venue, and Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s decision to override the jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment. The appeal thus challenged both the proof used to convict McMillian and the procedures through which the conviction and death sentence had been secured.

Stevenson had discouraged McMillian’s family from making the long trip to attend the early-morning oral argument. Because the legal issues seemed technical and each side had only thirty minutes, he had thought their attendance would not justify the expense and time away from work. After the argument, he regretted that choice: sympathetic faces in the courtroom might have made visible that the case was not routine. The State, by contrast, characterized it as an ordinary capital-murder case in which the death penalty had been properly imposed.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Stevenson’s arguments and affirmed McMillian’s conviction and death sentence in a seventy-page opinion. Stevenson had believed the lack of reliable corroboration would make affirmance difficult; the court’s decision proved otherwise. He drove to the prison to tell McMillian, who had raised his hopes despite being warned that overturning the conviction could take years. Montgomery was therefore both the place where the case received formal appellate consideration and the point from which its devastating result had to be carried back to the condemned man.