Alabama is more than the setting for the book’s legal cases: it is where the history of racial subordination becomes visible in the institutions that investigate, prosecute, try, and punish. The state’s past and present are joined through concrete mechanisms, from laws controlling interracial relationships and racially exclusionary juries to death sentences later overturned. Its courts and prisons appear as sites of both entrenched inequality and persistent efforts to secure relief.

Historical landscape and racial control

The book places Alabama within the Deep South’s retreat from Reconstruction. After federal troops left the state in the 1870s, the promise of racial equality for formerly enslaved people gave way quickly to white supremacy, the loss of African Americans’ voting rights, and laws designed to restore racial subordination. This history matters to the book’s contemporary cases because racial hierarchy was not confined to formal segregation: it also sought to regulate intimacy between Black men and white women.

Anti-miscegenation laws made interracial sex and marriage illegal, while the very term “miscegenation” had been coined by supporters of slavery to stoke fear of racial mixing. The book describes the enforcement of these laws as part of a wider preoccupation in the South with relationships such as that between Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly. Law-enforcement officials in many Southern communities treated the investigation and punishment of Black men who had been intimate with white women as part of their duty. So-called racial integrity laws also helped sustain racial hierarchy and were used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. In this account, Alabama’s racial history is not background detached from criminal justice; it informs who is treated as threatening and what the state claims authority to control.

Courts, juries, and capital cases

The state’s political and judicial institutions carried racial disparities into jury selection. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the presence of sixteen majority-Black counties. As African Americans began exercising their voting rights in the 1970s, some prosecutors and judges worried about the effects of changing racial demographics on reelection. The book also notes that county boundaries were arranged to preserve white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. Such measures illuminate the difference between acknowledging Black residents’ concerns and making substantive changes in the institutions that governed them.

Jury pools and jury service remained vulnerable to exclusion even after formal legal barriers were challenged. In parts of the Deep South, jury rolls drawn from voting rolls excluded many African Americans; later, clerks and judges used other methods to keep rolls predominantly white. Requirements that jurors be “intelligent and upright” could be used to exclude African Americans and women. Although court rulings in the 1970s addressed underrepresentation in jury pools, the constitutional bar on excluding people because of race did not guarantee that minority jurors would actually serve. Prosecutors’ discretionary peremptory strikes remained a powerful obstacle. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made challenges to racially discriminatory strikes more direct, but also prompted prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors.

Walter McMillian’s case makes these structures local and immediate. Monroe County was 40 percent Black, yet all-white juries remained common in serious felony cases, particularly capital cases. While awaiting trial, McMillian heard other prisoners’ warnings about race and the jury he might face. During a later hearing, the courtroom’s arrangement made the unequal treatment of supporters visible: a metal detector and a German shepherd stood inside the entrance, while the benches that had held McMillian’s supporters the day before were mostly occupied by older white people supporting the prosecution and the Morrison family. The episode connects the abstract history of jury exclusion to the practical question of who could enter and be present in court.

Prosecution, imprisonment, and vulnerability

Alabama’s capital-murder law also appears in cases involving the unexplained deaths of young children. The state’s child-victim category made the murder of a person under fourteen a capital offense, and the book describes how this exposed young mothers and juveniles to death-row prosecutions. At the time of Marsha Colbey’s case, all five women on Alabama’s death row had been sentenced for the unexplained deaths of young children or the deaths of abusive spouses or boyfriends. Colbey, only weeks after delivering a stillborn baby, was arrested and charged with capital murder. Her conviction and sentence were eventually overturned on appeal because the trial judge had not excluded biased jurors; after further review of the medical evidence, officials abandoned the case, and she was released in December 2012 following ten years of wrongful imprisonment.

Other cases show the range of people caught in the state’s criminal process. Evan Miller, a poor fourteen-year-old from North Alabama whose childhood included abuse, parental drug addiction, and time in foster care, was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole after a fatal incident. Anthony Ray Hinton was wrongly convicted of two robbery-murders outside Birmingham on the basis of flawed forensic evidence. His appointed lawyer received only $500 to hire an expert, and the expert ultimately retained had little experience testifying about firearms. The later discovery of warehouse records and witnesses supporting Hinton’s alibi, together with expert conclusions that his gun could not be matched to the murders, did not quickly end his imprisonment. These cases locate the consequences of inadequate defense and unreliable evidence within Alabama’s courts, not merely in abstract debates about punishment.

Holman Correctional Facility gives that system a physical address. Hinton spent nearly thirty years in solitary confinement there, in a five-by-seven-foot cell near the execution chamber. More than fifty people were executed during his time on death row; in the years when executions took place in the electric chair, he reported smelling burning flesh after midnight executions. In 2015, after the United States Supreme Court compelled prosecutors to reexamine the evidence and new testing confirmed his innocence, Hinton walked free. His release followed decades in which the state had continued toward execution despite evidence challenging the conviction.

Reform, release, and historical memory

The book also records a change in Alabama’s capital-punishment record. The number of death-row prisoners for whom the Equal Justice Initiative had won relief reached one hundred, creating a community of formerly condemned people who had been illegally convicted or sentenced and received new trials or sentencing hearings. Most did not return to death row. Beginning in 2012, Alabama went eighteen months without an execution; litigation over lethal-injection protocols and the reliability of capital punishment slowed executions, and in 2013 the state recorded its lowest number of new death sentences since capital punishment resumed in the mid-1970s. These developments are presented as significant but incomplete, particularly alongside Hinton’s continued confinement at the time the account was written.

The Equal Justice Initiative’s race-and-poverty work extended the struggle beyond individual cases. It began working with poor children and families in Black Belt counties, bringing hundreds of high-school students to its office for supplemental education and discussions of rights and justice. The organization also produced materials about slavery, lynching, and the history of racial injustice. The project’s purpose was to connect contemporary criminal-justice problems with racial myths and historical institutions that remained poorly understood. Alabama thus becomes both a site of legal contest and a place from which the broader national story of race and punishment can be retold. The book’s account of the state moves between the courthouse, the prison cell, and educational work: each setting shows a different way that history bears on present lives, and a different point at which people have sought to change its consequences.