Monroeville, Alabama is presented as a place where the promise of a famous story about justice sits uneasily beside the reality of a local prosecution. Best known to visitors for its association with Harper Lee and Atticus Finch, the town is also the center of Walter McMillian’s case: a Black man accused of Ronda Morrison’s murder, tried amid racial exclusion, and left for years to await execution. Its courthouse and its public memory become part of the conflict, while a church near town eventually frames a more intimate reckoning with what the case cost.

A literary landmark and a working courthouse

The Monroe County courthouse stood in downtown Monroeville, where Bryan Stevenson went to find the district attorney’s office. On an earlier visit, courthouse staff had asked where he was from; when he answered Montgomery, they enthusiastically explained the town’s prominence because of Harper Lee’s novel and its film adaptation. One clerk urged him to visit the old courthouse museum and stand where Gregory Peck had stood as Atticus Finch. Stevenson promised he would go, but held back the reason he had little time for the attraction: he was working on the case of an innocent Black man whom the community was trying to execute after a racially biased prosecution.

That contrast sharpened on a later courthouse visit. Stevenson was there to meet the new district attorney after learning that Darnell Houston, an alibi witness who had spoken with McMillian’s lawyers, had been arrested and indicted for perjury without first being interviewed by them. Stevenson suspected that officials had discovered Houston was talking to the defense and meant to punish or intimidate him. The encounter made the courthouse more than the setting of legal procedure: it was where the town’s celebrated fiction of justice met the defense’s account of how justice was being administered.

McMillian’s case and the town’s racial order

The local anger surrounding McMillian was explicit. In a meeting at the district attorney’s office, Tom Chapman told Stevenson that the murder had made people in Monroe County extremely angry and that some believed nothing bad enough could happen to McMillian. Stevenson acknowledged the tragedy of the crime but insisted that anger could not establish guilt: a fair trial and truthful testimony were necessary to determine what had happened. In Monroeville, then, community feeling was not merely background to the case. It pressed against the distinction between grief for a victim and proof against an accused man.

The case also unfolded within a history that shaped who could wield power in the courthouse. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state’s sixteen majority-Black counties. Monroe County was about 40 percent Black, yet Black residents’ growing participation in elections had not translated into substantive changes in the district attorney’s office. For decades, jury rolls and discretionary jury strikes had kept Black people from serving; even after court rulings against racial exclusion, defendants in counties that were 40 or 50 percent Black could still face all-white juries. The Supreme Court’s 1986 Batson v. Kentucky decision offered a more direct way to challenge discriminatory peremptory strikes, but also forced prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. McMillian, held on death row before trial, heard other prisoners’ warnings about race and the jury he might face, even as he left legal strategy to his lawyers.

The courthouse after the trial

Three years after McMillian’s trial, his lawyers filed a Rule 32 petition in Monroe County Circuit Court. It alleged that he had been unfairly tried, wrongly convicted, and illegally sentenced, raising claims that included ineffective counsel, undisclosed evidence, new evidence of innocence, and police and prosecutorial misconduct. The filing challenged a conviction that many people in Monroeville had come to treat as settled after the appeal was initially confirmed; in the prevailing local expectation, an execution date seemed the only remaining step.

The petition met resistance in the county. Judge Robert E. Lee Key had retired, and none of the new Monroe County judges appeared willing to take it on. The case was transferred to Baldwin County on the theory that post-conviction proceedings should be handled in the county of the initial trial, although McMillian’s trial had been presided over by a Monroe County judge. The Alabama Supreme Court then stayed the direct appeal so the Rule 32 petition could proceed, an unusual decision that signaled the case warranted further review and could open access to police and prosecutorial files. The courthouse thus marks both the original prosecution and the effort to reopen what its verdict had closed.

Mourning and the unresolved case

More than twenty years after Stevenson had spoken at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville about casting and catching stones, McMillian’s funeral was held there on a rainy Saturday morning. Scores filled the church, with dozens more standing outside. The congregation’s mostly poor, rural Black mourners gathered in a place Stevenson associated with the accumulated anguish and oppression of Monroe County. A television monitor near the casket showed photographs of McMillian, almost all taken on the day of his release from prison; several showed him standing beside Stevenson, both appearing happy. The images made release visible, but also brought the passage of time into the room.

After the service, Stevenson walked outside and looked down the road, thinking that no one had ever been prosecuted for Ronda Morrison’s murder after McMillian’s release. Her parents, he reflected, must still bear the anguish of that failure. People then approached him seeking legal help. He had brought no business cards, so he wrote down his number for each person and invited them to call, though he knew the office might not be able to help many. Monroeville’s significance in the narrative rests in this unresolved contrast: it is at once the site of a celebrated courthouse story, a prosecution shaped by racial inequality, and a community where release did not answer every question or repair every loss.