Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals overturns McMillian's conviction

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals’ reversal of Walter McMillian’s conviction and death sentence was a decisive break in a case shaped by racial suspicion and a deeply unequal legal system. It gave McMillian a new trial, not an acquittal, and turned a long period of uncertainty into a concrete chance to challenge the prosecution in court.

The Decision After a Long Wait

On February 23, nearly six weeks after Bryan Stevenson received the Alabama Bureau of Investigation’s report, a court clerk called to say the Court of Criminal Appeals had ruled in McMillian’s case and that the opinion was ready to be collected. Her cryptic assurance that Stevenson would like the decision sent him running to the courthouse. He was out of breath when he sat down with the thirty-five-page ruling.

The opinion invalidated both McMillian’s conviction and his death sentence. Stevenson later recognized that he had feared a loss more than he had allowed himself to admit; reading the decision brought that apprehension into focus at the very moment it gave way to relief.

What the Reversal Changed

The court ruled for McMillian on every claim except the question of his innocence: it did not conclude that he was innocent, and it did not order his release. Instead, it set aside the conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial. That distinction mattered. The ruling dismantled the existing judgment, but McMillian still faced the prospect of being tried again.

The reversal therefore marked a major procedural victory without resolving the underlying case. Its force lay in reopening a path that the conviction had appeared to close: the state would have to proceed toward a new trial rather than rely on the judgment that had sent McMillian to death row.

A Case in a Racialized Legal Setting

The ruling arrived against a wider background of racial inequality in Alabama’s criminal courts. In 1987, all forty of the state’s elected district attorneys were white, although sixteen counties had majority-Black populations. Monroe County, where McMillian was tried, was 40 percent Black. These facts describe the setting in which the case was prosecuted; they do not, by themselves, establish the grounds on which the appellate court ruled.

Jury selection offered another measure of the distance between formal legal protections and courtroom practice. The Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made it easier to challenge prosecutors’ racially discriminatory use of peremptory strikes, but the continuing use of such strikes remained a barrier to Black jury service. In death-penalty cases, defendants in counties that were 40 or 50 percent Black could still face all-white juries. McMillian had worried about race and the jury he would receive while on death row; the appellate reversal came within this broader struggle over who could participate in the justice system and how its decisions were made.

News Carried Back to Death Row

After reading the opinion, Stevenson drove directly to death row to tell McMillian in person. McMillian listened, leaned back, and answered with a familiar chuckle, slowly acknowledging that the news was good. Stevenson, still energized by the decision, insisted that it was great. Their different reactions gave the victory its human scale: the ruling was momentous, but it had not yet erased the possibility of another trial or the years of uncertainty behind them.