Tommy Chapman

Tommy Chapman was the Monroe County district attorney and the public defender of the prosecution that convicted Walter McMillian of Ronda Morrison’s murder. As doubts about the case moved from the courtroom into national view, Chapman stood firmly behind the verdict in public, then quietly sought a fresh investigation. His trajectory reveals the strain between institutional loyalty and mounting evidence—and ends not with a public confession, but with the State joining a motion that allowed McMillian to leave prison a free man.

Position in the Case

Chapman entered the story after district attorney Ted Pearson, who had pursued the case and expected to retire after nearly twenty years in office. By the time McMillian’s conviction and death sentence faced renewed scrutiny, Chapman had become the prosecutor defending them. His position carried particular weight in a state where, in 1987, all forty elected district attorneys were white, including those serving sixteen majority-Black counties. Legislators had also arranged judicial circuits to preserve white majorities in circuits that included majority-Black counties.

The jury system offered another measure of the racial inequality surrounding the prosecution. Although the United States Supreme Court had long barred racial exclusion from jury service, local practices had helped keep juries overwhelmingly white. In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made it easier to challenge prosecutors’ discriminatory use of peremptory strikes, while also prompting prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. This history does not establish how Chapman selected jurors in McMillian’s case, but it clarifies the racial stakes of a prosecution in a county that was 40 percent Black—and of a trial whose evidence many Black residents already distrusted.

Public Defense of the Conviction

When CBS’s 60 Minutes investigated the case, Chapman became a prominent voice for the prosecution. Ed Bradley and producer David Gelber traveled from New York City to Monroeville in July, interviewing McMillian, Ralph Myers, Karen Kelly, Darnell Houston, members of McMillian’s family, and other people connected with the case. They also confronted Bill Hooks at his workplace and conducted an extensive interview with Chapman. Before the program aired, the Monroe Journal suggested that visiting reporters arrived with their minds made up and portrayed the coverage as another dismissive “big-time reporter comes to hick town” story.

Chapman, too, argued that the television team had prejudged the case. He offered CBS a photograph of McMillian taken at the time of his arrest, when McMillian had long hair and a beard, and described the person seen in the prison interview as different from the man arrested by Sheriff Tate. The contrast was misleading: Alabama prisoners were required to remain clean-shaven. The image helped sustain a threatening public portrait of McMillian even as the defense challenged the reliability of the conviction.

After 60 Minutes broadcast its report, the local press and Chapman attacked it. The Mobile Press Register reported his condemnation of the program: “For them to hold themselves up as a reputable news show is beyond belief, and irresponsible.” Local coverage also framed the attention as an injury to Ronda Morrison’s parents and emphasized that publicity might lead people to think McMillian was innocent. The broader newspaper narrative had already called McMillian a “drug kingpin,” a “sexual predator,” and a “gang leader,” linking him to alleged crimes beyond the murder for which he had been convicted. In that climate, Chapman’s statements reinforced the prosecution’s account just as the broadcast gave viewers access to evidence that local coverage had largely left out.

The televised report nevertheless changed the case’s public setting. People who regularly watched 60 Minutes encountered a summary of the defense evidence, and some community leaders began asking officials difficult questions. Black residents, many of whom had long whispered that McMillian was wrongfully convicted, welcomed the coverage. Chapman, in his interview, dismissed the suggestion of racial bias as silly, asserted his certainty that McMillian was guilty, and said he should be executed as soon as possible. He also expressed contempt for McMillian’s attorneys and for “people who try to second-guess juries.”

Doubt and a New Investigation

Chapman’s public certainty did not reflect the full extent of his private concerns. The defense hearing had exposed serious problems in the evidence, and Chapman could not ignore them. He also had reason to fear that the Court of Criminal Appeals might overturn the conviction, a result that would damage the credibility he had placed behind the prosecution and the work of local investigators.

Shortly after the hearing, Chapman brought Sheriff Tate, Woodrow Ikner, and Benson together and asked them to explain the contradictions the defense had presented. He was not persuaded by their answers. He then formally asked the Alabama Bureau of Investigation to conduct a new investigation, ostensibly to confirm McMillian’s guilt. That was the re-examination McMillian’s attorneys had sought for more than two years, yet Chapman did not tell them directly that he had requested it.

When the new investigators, Tom Taylor and Greg Cole, contacted the defense, Bryan Stevenson agreed to share files, memoranda, and original evidence. He worried that disclosing so much might disadvantage the defense if the case were retried, but believed an honest investigation would expose the weakness of the charges. Within weeks, Taylor and Cole appeared to doubt McMillian’s guilt. Chapman’s decision to involve investigators outside the local circle thus opened a path toward a more credible review, even as his public statements continued to defend the old verdict.

Reversal and Release

After the appellate court ruled in McMillian’s favor, Stevenson called Chapman to say he intended to move to dismiss all charges. Chapman did not immediately promise to join the motion; he said he would respond after it was filed. He did, however, say the State would not oppose it. At the eventual hearing, the State joined the motion, clearing the way for McMillian’s release.

Chapman then asked Stevenson whether, once the proceeding was over, he could shake McMillian’s hand. He added, “This case has taught me things I didn’t even know I had to learn.” The exchange marked a change in posture: the prosecutor who had publicly insisted that McMillian was guilty and should be executed sought a personal gesture toward the man whose conviction had been overturned. The book does not present this as a detailed account of Chapman’s private reckoning, and it does not erase his earlier defense of the case. Instead, the restrained ending leaves the contradiction visible: a public advocate of the conviction, a prosecutor who came to question its evidence, and a State that ultimately joined in ending the prosecution.