Racial disparities in criminal justice

Racial disparities in criminal justice are not portrayed as isolated acts of prejudice, but as the accumulated effects of laws, institutional practices, and assumptions that shape who is suspected, believed, punished, and heard. The book traces those effects from the suppression of interracial relationships and the exclusion of Black jurors to the contemporary overrepresentation of people of color in prisons, using the prosecution of Walter McMillian to show how historical patterns can enter the particulars of a criminal case.

Historical Foundations

The account connects present-day inequality to successive systems of racial control. After federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, voting rights were taken from African Americans and restrictive laws helped restore white supremacy. Laws against interracial sex and marriage were part of this structure: they criminalized intimacy such as the relationship between Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly, while reinforcing a racial hierarchy inherited from slavery. The book also notes that such statutes were used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Policing Black men’s relationships with white women was not treated as incidental; in many Southern communities, law enforcement regarded investigation and punishment as part of its duty.

The later history of racial terror, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration is presented as connected rather than as a sequence of unrelated eras. The book describes racial terror after Reconstruction as a pervasive threat that traumatized African Americans, while convict leasing criminalized formerly enslaved people and returned many to coerced labor. Jim Crow then legalized segregation and suppressed basic rights. These histories matter to the account not only as background: they shaped the conditions in which later criminal laws and institutions operated, and the assumptions through which Black people were viewed.

The McMillian Case and Unequal Credibility

The prosecution of Walter McMillian shows how racialized suspicion could substitute for investigation. Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man, but Tate had not investigated McMillian’s background or whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew about McMillian’s affair with Karen Kelly and had heard rumors that McMillian’s independence meant he was dealing drugs. The accusations of Ralph Myers appeared sufficient to support an arrest, despite the absence of an adequate inquiry.

The evidence of McMillian’s whereabouts supplied a concrete counter-narrative. On the day Ronda Morrison was murdered, a fish fry was held at McMillian’s home to raise money for a church. His sister, Evelyn Smith, and her family sold food from the front yard; at least a dozen parishioners were there that morning. McMillian himself had no tree-cutting job that day. He was at home replacing his truck’s transmission with the help of mechanic Jimmy Hunter: they had dismantled the truck by 9:30 a.m., and relatives arrived to prepare food by 11. The contrast is central to the account: community knowledge and a detailed alibi existed, while the sheriff’s decision rested on an accusation and suspicions attached to McMillian’s private life.

The treatment of testimony continued to reveal an imbalance in whose knowledge counted. When Bryan Stevenson challenged prosecutor Tom Chapman about the case, Chapman dismissed the views of people who believed McMillian innocent as uninformed, insisted there was evidence implicating him, and said his job was to defend the conviction. Stevenson also objected that a perjury indictment against alibi witness Darnell Houston could intimidate people who might contradict the State’s case. Later, at the post-conviction hearing, Myers was asked whether his trial testimony had been true. He answered that it had not. The recantation directly challenged the testimony on which the prosecution had relied, after years in which the State’s account had been treated as authoritative.

Jury Selection and Institutional Practice

The book places the case within a wider history of exclusion from juries. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, although sixteen counties had majority-Black populations. In counties such as Monroe County, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors could still exclude Black citizens through jury-selection practices that often left defendants facing all-white juries. Earlier legal prohibitions on racial exclusion had not ensured meaningful representation: jury rolls were drawn from voting rolls that had excluded African Americans, and officials also used standards such as being intelligent and upright to keep Black people and women off juries.

The distinction between being summoned and actually serving was consequential. The United States Supreme Court had ruled that underrepresentation in jury pools was unconstitutional, but it had not required that Black people or women actually sit on juries. Peremptory strikes remained a powerful means of exclusion; although the Court had condemned racially discriminatory use of these strikes, the standard for proving discrimination was so difficult that no successful challenge had been brought in twenty years. Batson v. Kentucky, decided in 1986, made challenges more direct, but the book observes that it also forced prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. McMillian, held on death row before trial, was acutely aware of the concern: other prisoners warned him about race and the jury he might face, even as he left legal strategy to his lawyers.

The courtroom itself could reproduce that unequal access. During the McMillian proceedings, a metal detector and a German shepherd stood inside the courtroom entrance. The benches that had held McMillian’s supporters the previous day were now mostly occupied by older white supporters of the Morrisons and the prosecution, while McMillian’s family and supporters had been told they could not enter. The scene gives institutional form to a disparity already visible in jury selection and credibility: who could appear in court, and whose presence was treated as ordinary, were not evenly distributed.

Poverty, Age, and Exposure to Punishment

The book also describes cases in which racial inequality intersects with poverty, childhood, disability, and gender. Trina Garnett grew up as the youngest of twelve children in a poor section of Chester, Pennsylvania, where nearly 46 percent of children lived below the federal poverty level and the public school system ranked last among the state’s 501 districts. Her home was marked by severe abuse. After her mother died, Trina’s emotional and mental health problems worsened; when she became acutely ill, her sisters could get her to a hospital, but her poverty meant she was not allowed to stay long enough to stabilize or recover.

At fourteen, Trina entered a row house with a friend and lit matches to find the boys’ room. The house caught fire and two sleeping boys died of smoke asphyxiation. Her lawyer thought she was incompetent to stand trial but failed to seek the necessary determination or challenge her trial as an adult. Her friend testified against her in exchange for having the charges dropped. Although the judge found that Trina had no intent to kill, Pennsylvania law required life imprisonment without parole for second-degree murder and did not permit him to account for her age, mental illness, poverty, abuse, or the circumstances of the fire. This case is not presented as interchangeable with McMillian’s racialized prosecution; it shows how rigid punishment can compound vulnerability when poverty and childhood restrict a person’s ability to obtain treatment and meaningful legal protection.

Marsha Colbey’s prosecution provides another example of the way criminal justice can turn uncertainty into severe punishment. A few weeks after delivering a stillborn son, she was arrested and charged with capital murder. The State’s pathologist, Kathleen Enstice, initially said the baby had been born alive before examining the body, later acknowledged she had no basis for that opinion at the time, and testified that the baby had drowned. The State’s own expert, obstetrician-gynecologist Dennis McNally, described the pregnancy as high-risk for unexplained fetal death; defense expert Werner Spitz rejected the conclusion that the circumstances established a live birth or homicide. The book situates Colbey’s case within a broader pattern of women on Alabama’s death row, all condemned for the unexplained deaths of young children or the deaths of abusive partners. These examples widen the account beyond race alone while underscoring how poverty, gender, and family circumstances can shape exposure to prosecution and punishment.

Mass Incarceration and the Work of Reframing

The book identifies mass incarceration as the fourth major institution shaping the relationship between race and justice. It points to the extreme overrepresentation of people of color in prisons, disproportionate sentences for racial minorities, targeted drug prosecutions in poor communities, criminalization of immigrants, felony disenfranchisement, and barriers to re-entry. These patterns, it argues, cannot be fully understood apart from racial history. Their consequences extend beyond imprisonment: they affect political participation and the possibility of returning to community life.

The Equal Justice Initiative’s race and poverty work sought to make that history more visible. It developed a racial history calendar, worked with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South, brought high school students to its office for education and discussion about rights and justice, and produced materials about slavery, lynching, and racial injustice. The project treated historical context as part of criminal-justice work, not as a separate subject. Its purpose was to challenge the racial myths that shape judgments about justice and to make contemporary disparities legible as part of a longer institutional history. The account’s central claim is therefore both historical and practical: unequal outcomes persist not only through explicit discrimination, but also through everyday decisions about suspicion, evidence, jury membership, punishment, and whose experiences are taken seriously.