Tuscaloosa, Alabama, served two sharply different purposes in the book: it was the starting point for a new legal center seeking representation for condemned people, and the site of a state hospital where Ralph Myers was assessed after his psychological distress worsened on death row. The law center soon had to leave the city, while Myers’s hospital stay did not alter the predicament that had brought him there.

The Law Center’s First Home

In February 1989, Bryan Stevenson and Eva Ansley opened a nonprofit law center in Tuscaloosa to provide free, quality legal services to men and women on Alabama’s death row. The opening marked an institutional beginning, but not a secure one. The first director resigned within months, and the University of Alabama School of Law, where the office had been established, withdrew both its support and its promised office space.

The center also struggled to recruit lawyers willing to move to Alabama for full-time death-penalty work at salaries below $25,000 a year. Its difficulties were compounded when the state legislature denied the funding needed to obtain federal matching dollars. After disheartening meetings with the board, Stevenson and Ansley concluded that they lacked state support for the project and would have to raise money themselves.

Departure and a New Base

Tuscaloosa was the center’s launch site, not its lasting base. Stevenson and Ansley regrouped and decided to start again in Montgomery, the state capital; the project would eventually be named the Equal Justice Initiative. The account distinguishes the initial opening in Tuscaloosa from the later effort to establish a more durable operation in Montgomery. The city’s significance lies in that precarious first step: the work began there amid institutional withdrawal, funding obstacles, and uncertainty about whether the center could survive.

Taylor Hardin and Ralph Myers

Tuscaloosa also housed Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility, which conducted diagnostic and assessment work for courts handling people accused of crimes who might be incompetent to stand trial because of mental illness. After Ralph Myers refused to testify against Walter McMillian, he was sent back to death row. His distress became so serious over the following weeks that prison officials arranged for him to spend thirty days at Taylor Hardin.

The hospital stay did little to change Myers’s situation. He hoped to return to the county jail afterward, but instead was sent back to death row. Believing he could not escape the circumstances he had created, he then told investigators he was ready to testify against McMillian. In this episode, Tuscaloosa is the setting for an institutional assessment that precedes, but does not resolve, Myers’s return to the prosecution’s case.

A City of Institutional Beginnings

These two episodes place Tuscaloosa at an uneasy intersection of legal advocacy and criminal procedure. The law center began there with an ambitious promise of representation, only to lose its university backing and relocate. Taylor Hardin, meanwhile, evaluated Myers in a system that defense lawyers criticized for almost never finding serious mental disabilities that would prevent defendants from standing trial. The city is therefore associated both with a fragile attempt to build access to counsel and with a medical institution whose assessment did not free a distressed defendant from death row or the pressure to testify.