J. L. Chestnut

J. L. Chestnut was a Selma lawyer with a record of civil-rights work in the Black community and one of the region’s few Black criminal defense attorneys. Alongside Bruce Boynton, he represented Walter McMillian after McMillian’s family raised money through church donations and the financing of their meager possessions. Chestnut’s work placed him at the intersection of individual defense and a court system in which race shaped who could serve on a jury, whose testimony received credence, and where a trial would be held.

Identity and Background

Chestnut was described as fiery and experienced in efforts to enforce civil rights in the Black community. His co-counsel, Bruce Boynton, also brought civil-rights credentials: Boynton’s mother, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was a legendary activist, and Boynton himself had a strong record in the movement. Together, they were the only Black criminal lawyers in the region whom McMillian’s family could hire. Their involvement mattered in practical terms, but local officials treated the decision to retain outside counsel as a provocation rather than an ordinary effort to secure a defense.

The case also carried a charged racial and sexual context. McMillian had been intimate with Karen Kelly, a white woman, and the book places such relationships within a long history of laws and policing designed to preserve racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction, restrictions on Black voting and laws criminalizing interracial intimacy helped sustain white supremacy; in many Southern communities, law enforcement treated the policing of Black men’s relationships with white women as part of its duty. This history helps explain why McMillian’s case could not be reduced to the evidence of a single murder: racialized suspicion surrounded the defendant before the trial began.

Defending McMillian Before Trial

When McMillian’s family retained Chestnut and Boynton, their experience did not persuade local officials to release him or prevent his transfer to Holman Prison. The transfer left McMillian on death row before trial, in a small, hot cell and under the pressure of an approaching execution. During the trip, Tom Tate was furious that McMillian had involved outside counsel and mocked him for believing that it would make a difference. The effort to obtain representation thus brought no immediate relief; officials instead treated the money raised by family and church as evidence of a secret fortune and a supposedly deceptive double life.

As the case approached trial, Chestnut’s knowledge of Alabama’s courts informed his understanding of the prosecution’s strategic choices. Ted Pearson had to account for the 1986 Batson v. Kentucky ruling, which made it more possible to challenge prosecutors’ racially discriminatory use of peremptory strikes. The decision offered Black defendants new grounds to object, but did not eliminate the practice of removing Black prospective jurors. Chestnut and Boynton were experienced civil-rights lawyers, and Pearson knew they would not hesitate to object. He was less concerned, however, that Judge Robert E. Lee Key would take those objections seriously.

The Venue Hearing

In October 1987, Chestnut and Boynton presented a motion to change venue. They had little expectation that the court would grant their pretrial motions and were focused on preparing for a trial scheduled for February. Pearson unexpectedly supported the request, citing the extraordinary publicity surrounding the murder of Ronda Morrison. Judge Robert E. Lee Key granted it. Chestnut, who knew his way around Alabama courts, immediately suspected that something was wrong and believed the judge and prosecutor had already conspired.

The judge proposed moving the trial to a neighboring county so witnesses would not have to travel far. That possibility initially seemed less alarming: several counties bordering Monroe County had substantial Black populations, including Wilcox County at 72 percent and Conecuh County at 46 percent. Baldwin County was the conspicuous exception. Affluent and situated along the Gulf of Mexico, it had a Black population of only 9 percent. The apparent concession to the defense therefore carried a hidden consequence: a change of venue could place McMillian before a jury drawn from a far less representative community. The account identifies Chestnut’s apprehension before the court’s decision, not a specific statement by him about the county ultimately chosen.

At Trial

The trial confirmed the importance of the jury-selection issue. Jury selection lasted only a few hours. Pearson used peremptory strikes to exclude all but one of the handful of Black people summoned for jury service, and Chestnut and Boynton objected. Judge Robert E. Lee Key summarily dismissed their complaints. The constitutional possibility opened by Batson thus met, in this courtroom, an objection process that failed to alter the jury’s composition in any substantial way.

Chestnut also confronted Ralph Myers, the prosecution’s principal witness. Myers claimed that McMillian had forced him to drive to Jackson Cleaners because his arm hurt, that he had entered and seen McMillian standing over Morrison’s body, and that a mysterious white man with salt-and-pepper hair had directed the murder. The account describes Chestnut’s cross-examination as making clear that Myers was lying. Yet the State brought Myers back to repeat his accusations, as if repetition could make contradictions irrelevant. Chestnut’s cross-examination exposed the weakness of the testimony, but it did not cause the prosecution to abandon it.

The other evidence raised questions that the defense did not fully develop. Bill Hooks testified that he had seen McMillian’s truck leaving the cleaners and identified it as a low-rider. McMillian immediately told his lawyers that the truck had not been modified that way until months after Morrison’s murder. His lawyers did little with the information, frustrating him. Another witness, Joe Hightower, also claimed to have seen the truck. There were twelve people who could support the account that McMillian was at a fish fry at home when Morrison was killed, but the defense called only three. Chestnut’s cross-examination was forceful, yet the trial’s abbreviated pace and the limited presentation of the alibi left other substantial challenges to the State’s case underused.

Narrative and Legal Significance

Chestnut’s role shows both the force and the limits of skilled defense lawyering in McMillian’s case. He brought civil-rights experience to a prosecution in which a nearly all-white jury was selected despite the county’s large Black population, and he tested a central witness whose account contained glaring contradictions. But an objection could be dismissed, an exposed witness could be recalled, and a seemingly favorable venue motion could deepen the risk of racial exclusion. The contrast is central to the account: legal doctrine created openings for challenge, while the local decisions governing jury selection and trial procedure could sharply restrict their effect.

Chestnut is presented not as a lawyer able to control the outcome, but as a practitioner who recognized the danger in the process and contested what he could within it. His suspicion at the venue hearing, his and Boynton’s jury-selection objections, and his cross-examination of Myers form a sequence of resistance against a prosecution that pressed ahead despite community doubts and suspect testimony. The case’s wider historical frame—racial hierarchy maintained through law, including the policing of interracial relationships—gives those courtroom choices their significance without making them sufficient to overcome the system in which they were made.