Tom Tate

Tom Tate, the Monroe County sheriff, became the principal local authority behind the arrest and prosecution of Walter McMillian for the murder of Ronda Morrison. Faced with an unsolved crime and mounting public criticism, Tate helped turn an unsupported accusation into a capital case: officers arrested McMillian on a pretextual charge, threatened him with racist violence, and later placed him on death row before trial. The account makes Tate consequential not only for what he did to one defendant, but for how local pressure and racial assumptions shaped the exercise of law-enforcement power.

Identity and Position

Tate was elected sheriff only days after Morrison’s murder. The crime—a killing in a popular downtown business—had unsettled Monroeville, where murder was uncommon. Initial leads failed: police eliminated two Latino men who had been seen seeking work, found no evidence against the former owner of the cleaners, and considered the current owner an unlikely suspect. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation also made no breakthrough. As months passed without an arrest, residents and local media criticized the police, the sheriff, and the prosecutor. Businesses offered rewards, gun sales rose, and anxiety intensified.

Tate had little law-enforcement experience. He described himself as deeply local and took pride in having rarely left Monroeville. Four months into his term, he was confronting an unsolved murder and a public increasingly impatient for results. The book places that pressure alongside the weakness of the case eventually built against McMillian: the community’s desire for an arrest was real, but it did not supply reliable evidence.

From Suspicion to Arrest

Tate and other officials had reason to know about McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly. Her custody hearings had made the affair a subject of gossip, and Tate likely knew of it before Ralph Myers implicated McMillian. The account is careful about the distinction between suspicion and proof: there was no evidence connecting McMillian to Morrison’s murder, and no evidence that he had a criminal history. What officials did have was an African American man involved in an adulterous relationship with a white woman—a fact that, within a deeply racist social order, could be treated as a sign of dangerousness in place of evidence.

After months of failed investigation, Tate, Alabama Bureau of Investigation lead investigator Simon Benson, and district attorney’s investigator Larry Ikner decided to arrest McMillian primarily on Myers’s allegation. They had not yet done much investigation into McMillian and planned to use a pretextual charge while building their case. When Myers said he feared McMillian, an officer suggested that McMillian might have sexually assaulted him. Myers recognized the usefulness of the suggestion and affirmed it. Because Alabama law prohibited nonprocreative sex, officials planned to arrest him on a sodomy charge.

On June 7, 1987, Tate led more than a dozen officers to a back-country road McMillian used on his way home from work. They stopped his truck, drew their weapons, and surrounded him. When McMillian asked what he had done, Tate said he was under arrest for sodomy. McMillian did not understand the term; after Tate explained it crudely, he laughed in disbelief at the accusation. Tate responded with racial slurs and threats of lynching. The arrest thus made the racial logic behind the pretext explicit: Tate threatened McMillian for his relationship with white women and invoked the recent lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile as a model of what could be done to him.

Death-Row Confinement

Myers later recanted his allegations, but investigators pressed him for more incriminating details rather than accepting that his story was false. Tate and his investigators arranged for both Myers and McMillian to be placed on death row before trial, an extraordinary and punitive use of confinement against men who had not been convicted. On August 1, 1987, Tate drove McMillian to Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. Before the transfer, he again threatened McMillian with racial slurs and frightening plans. The account does not establish how Tate secured the warden’s agreement to house pretrial detainees on death row, though Tate knew people at the prison from his earlier work as a probation officer.

The transfer placed McMillian in a five-by-eight-foot cell in a remote, windowless unit, where prisoners were locked alone for twenty-three hours a day and had few visits or privileges. The heat in August could exceed 100 degrees for days or weeks. Tate’s action therefore did more than move a defendant between facilities: it subjected an untried man to the harshest confinement available and helped create pressure on both McMillian and Myers. McMillian arrived among roughly a hundred men sentenced to death in Alabama since capital punishment had been restored in 1975; many were Black, nearly 40 percent were white, and all were poor. The other prisoners repeatedly asked him why he was there.

Evidence and Confrontation

When Bryan Stevenson and his colleagues later investigated the prosecution, they found evidence that undermined the State’s witnesses and exposed information that had not been disclosed to the defense. County financial records showed that Tate had paid Bill Hooks nearly $5,000 in reward money and expenses, including money for travel around the time of trial. Hooks had also been released from jail after giving police a statement placing McMillian’s truck at the cleaners. Records showed that county officials had managed to get city charges and fines against him dismissed, despite lacking authority in city court. These benefits bore directly on the credibility of a witness whose testimony implicated McMillian.

The recorded interrogations of Myers supplied another account of the investigation’s methods. In statements made to Tate, Benson, and Ikner, Myers repeatedly said he knew nothing about the Morrison murder or McMillian; the recordings captured both officers’ threats and Myers’s resistance to framing an innocent man. At the later evidentiary hearing, the tapes contradicted Myers’s trial testimony and exposed that he had made at least six additional statements beyond the two the prosecution had represented to the court. The statements were typed, favorable to McMillian, and undisclosed to his attorneys. Their contents made the official case look less like a straightforward investigation than the product of pressure and suppressed contrary evidence.

Years later, Tate attended a meeting at the Monroe County courthouse where the prosecution files were turned over under court order. He appeared with Larry Ikner and met Stevenson and investigator Michael O’Connor. Tate came in boots, jeans, and a light shirt; he remained mostly civil while knowing that the defense team accused the officers of misconduct. During the meeting, he treated O’Connor as a northerner, a small exchange that exposed the local boundaries through which the men viewed one another even in a formal legal setting. The scene did not resolve the allegations, but it placed Tate face to face with the lawyers examining the choices he had made.

Narrative and Historical Significance

Tate’s role sits within a history in which racial control over intimacy helped sustain white supremacy. The book traces how fears of interracial sex and marriage were used to dismantle Reconstruction, uphold Jim Crow, and justify laws that criminalized relationships such as McMillian and Kelly’s. In that context, Tate’s threats were not merely abusive language accompanying an arrest: they joined a longstanding public message that Black men who crossed racial boundaries could be treated as threats and punished through violence.

The wider legal setting also clarifies the stakes without making Tate personally responsible for every part of the system. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, while the state included sixteen majority-Black counties. In capital cases, Black defendants could still face all-white juries, despite longstanding constitutional prohibitions on racial exclusion. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky offered a more direct way to challenge discriminatory peremptory strikes, but the history described in the book shows how entrenched the practice remained. Tate’s choices helped bring McMillian into that unequal process: a weak accusation became an arrest, a fabricated pretext became a route to custody, and pretrial custody became death-row punishment. The account’s central indictment is therefore both personal and institutional: the sheriff wielded local authority under public pressure, but the racial assumptions that made McMillian seem like a plausible target long predated the case.