Racial profiling and presumed guilt

Racial profiling and presumed guilt operate in the book not only as overt suspicion of individuals, but as a structure that influences whose presence seems out of place, whose testimony is believed, and whose guilt is assumed before evidence is tested. The episodes range from jury selection and unequal courtroom access to a judge mistaking a Black defense attorney for someone who did not belong. Together, they show how a presumption can be reproduced by ordinary decisions even when no official describes those decisions as racial discrimination.

Historical Structure

The narrative connects contemporary racial suspicion to the long effort to preserve racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction, the restoration of white supremacy in the South brought the removal of Black voting rights and laws designed to enforce racial subordination. The policing of interracial relationships was part of that structure: law enforcement officials in many Southern communities treated the investigation and punishment of Black men intimate with white women as part of their duty. Walter McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly therefore became more than a private matter. When he was subpoenaed in a child-custody dispute and acknowledged being Kelly’s friend, hostility followed him from the courthouse, and his standing in the community changed. The account places that reaction within a history in which interracial intimacy had been legally prohibited and made an object of intense white Southern preoccupation.

The book also situates racial profiling within a wider historical sequence: slavery, racial terror after Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. It argues that the racial terror enforced through lynching helped shape the modern death penalty, while the daily humiliations of segregation left harms that have been too readily obscured by celebrations of civil-rights progress. In this framework, profiling is not an isolated mistake or merely a matter of individual prejudice. It belongs to an accumulated history that determines which people are watched, distrusted, and presumed dangerous.

Suspicion in Courts and Public Institutions

The jury system illustrates how formal rules can preserve exclusion after explicit barriers are prohibited. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, although sixteen counties had Black majorities. In serious cases in Monroe County, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors had often excluded all African American prospective jurors. Earlier rulings barred racial exclusion, but jury rolls drawn from voting lists, discretionary selection practices, and supposedly neutral standards such as whether jurors were “intelligent and upright” helped keep juries predominantly white. The constitutional prohibition did not itself guarantee that Black people would serve; it required only that they not be excluded on the basis of race.

The Supreme Court of the United States made racially discriminatory peremptory strikes unconstitutional in the mid-1960s, but the evidentiary burden for proving discrimination was so high that no successful challenge followed for twenty years. Striking all or nearly all Black prospective jurors continued. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky offered defendants a more direct means to challenge those strikes, but the account notes that prosecutors were then forced to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. For Walter, the question was immediate: even in a county with a substantial Black population, he feared facing an all-white jury in a capital case.

Unequal treatment also appeared in the physical organization of the courtroom. During Walter’s hearing, a metal detector and a German shepherd stood just inside the courtroom entrance. The benches that had held Walter’s supporters the day before were now mostly occupied by older white supporters of the Morrison family and the prosecution. Walter’s family and supporters had been told they could not enter, while the State’s supporters were admitted. The scene made access itself part of the contest: security and courtroom procedure did not fall evenly on the two sides.

The Presumption Made Visible

A later courtroom encounter makes the force of racial assumptions explicit. Bryan Stevenson was seated at counsel table in an empty Midwestern courtroom, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, preparing to represent a young client. A judge entered with the prosecutor, saw him, and said, “Hey, you shouldn’t be in here without counsel. Go back outside and wait in the hallway until your lawyer arrives.” Stevenson explained, “Oh, I’m sorry, Your Honor, we haven’t met. My name is Bryan Stevenson, I am the lawyer on the case set for hearing this morning.” The judge laughed at the mistake, and the prosecutor joined him.

Stevenson laughed too, but not because the assumption was harmless to him. His client was a white child being prosecuted as an adult, and Stevenson did not want a confrontation with the judge to disadvantage the child before the hearing. The moment therefore contains two opposing pressures: the casualness with which the judge misread a Black lawyer’s place in the courtroom, and the lawyer’s need to manage the consequences without allowing his own objection to harm a client. The book acknowledges that innocent mistakes occur, while emphasizing that repeated insults and suspicions accumulate. Being watched, doubted, distrusted, and presumed guilty carries a burden that cannot be understood apart from the history behind it.

The same dynamic shapes how officials framed Walter McMillian before his case was fairly resolved. Judge Robert E. Lee Key called Stevenson after receiving notice that he had entered an appearance, asked why he would represent Walter, and warned that Walter was reputed to be one of the biggest drug dealers in South Alabama. Key also described the case as ugly and speculated that the men involved might be the Dixie Mafia. The warning presented a damaging reputation as a reason to withdraw before the evidence had been examined. It exemplifies how an allegation can become the starting point for institutional judgment rather than a claim requiring scrutiny.

Vulnerability, Credibility, and the Reach of Suspicion

The book’s other cases show how presumed guilt can combine with poverty, age, disability, and gender. In Chester, Pennsylvania, Trina Garnett grew up amid severe poverty and abuse. At fourteen, after entering a house with a friend and lighting matches to find the boys’ room, she was involved in a fire that killed two sleeping children. Traumatized and barely able to speak when arrested, she was considered possibly incompetent by her appointed lawyer. Yet the lawyer failed to support an incompetency determination or challenge her trial as an adult. Her friend testified against her in exchange for having the charges dropped, and Trina was convicted. The sentencing judge found that she had no intent to kill, but Pennsylvania’s mandatory sentence for second-degree murder left no room to consider her age, illness, poverty, or abuse. Her circumstances did not prevent the system from treating her as an adult responsible for a fixed and final punishment.

Victoria Banks’s case exposes a still more basic failure to test an accusation. Banks was a Black woman with an intellectual disability. Police accused her of killing a newborn despite having no credible basis for believing she had ever been pregnant. She and her sister accepted a prison sentence rather than risk a capital-murder prosecution; officials refused to investigate her claim of innocence before sending her to prison. The Equal Justice Initiative established that Banks had undergone a tubal ligation five years before her arrest, making pregnancy and childbirth biologically impossible. Here, the presumption of guilt persisted even where the alleged child had never existed.

The account of Marsha Colbey likewise shows how a vulnerable person could be turned into a capital defendant on the strength of an unsupported forensic conclusion. A state pathologist initially said Colbey’s baby had been born alive before conducting an examination, later conceding she had no basis for that opinion at that stage. At trial, the pathologist characterized live birth as a “diagnosis of exclusion,” while other medical testimony challenged the inference. The book places such prosecutions within a wider pattern: poor women faced suspicion after unexplained infant deaths, and Alabama’s child-victim capital-murder category had sent young mothers and juveniles to death row. These cases do not all establish racial profiling in the same direct way; taken together, they show how assumptions about who is dangerous, irresponsible, or unworthy of careful investigation can compound with race, poverty, disability, age, and family circumstances.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The book’s account of presumed guilt reaches beyond the moment when a person is first suspected. In Walter’s case, racialized assumptions helped shape the atmosphere around his relationship with Karen, the jury he feared, and the treatment of his supporters in court. In the later courtroom encounter, a lawyer’s professional role was misread through race even as he had to suppress his response to protect a client. Across the cases of Trina, Victoria, and Marsha, the narrative contrasts the weight given to suspicion with the inadequate attention given to evidence, context, and the accused person’s circumstances.

That contrast is central to the book’s argument about criminal justice and racial history. Presumed guilt is not simply a conclusion reached at trial; it can organize the steps that precede one—who is investigated, who is believed, who is allowed into the courtroom, and whether a defense receives meaningful consideration. By pairing explicit institutional patterns, such as jury exclusion, with small interactions like the judge’s mistaken command, the narrative makes visible both the durable structure and its everyday operation.