Montgomery serves as a practical center of Bryan Stevenson’s work and as a place repeatedly connected to Walter McMillian’s changing circumstances. It is where Stevenson runs the Equal Justice Initiative, where a new attorney arrives to take up McMillian’s case, and where temporary accommodation and care are arranged for McMillian after years of wrongful imprisonment. The city is not presented as the site of every decisive legal event; instead, its significance emerges through the work, travel, and difficult arrangements that gather around it.

A Base for Legal Work

Bernard Harcourt came to Montgomery shortly before Michael O’Connor left Stevenson’s office to become a federal public defender in San Diego. Harcourt had first worked with Stevenson as a student at Harvard Law School, then asked a federal judge to shorten his clerkship so he could join the office in Alabama. Raised in New York City by French parents, educated at Princeton, and previously employed in banking, he had been preparing for a conventional legal career before a summer working on death-penalty cases changed his direction. He and his girlfriend moved to Montgomery, where Harcourt’s arrival placed him close to the work that had drawn him away from that expected path.

His first major assignment there was to replace O’Connor on Walter McMillian’s case. Harcourt’s rapid entry into the case intensified his experience of life in Alabama, while the office continued to pursue leads and interview people who might know something about Monroe County. Montgomery thus functions as the team’s base, not as a substitute for the communities and court proceedings where the underlying case unfolded. It is the place from which investigators and lawyers could keep working as the legal effort expanded.

Work That Reached Beyond the City

Stevenson’s responsibilities in Montgomery coexisted with a far wider circuit of work. Around the same period, he began teaching at New York University School of Law, traveling to New York for classes and then flying back to Montgomery to run the Equal Justice Initiative. He invited McMillian to speak with students each year. The classroom was in New York, but the invitation grew out of the continuing relationship between the lawyer, the client, and the organization Stevenson managed from Montgomery.

McMillian usually spoke briefly and answered questions in short phrases. He joked with students, said he was grateful to be free rather than angry or bitter, and described the faith that had helped him endure hundreds of nights on death row. His presence gave students a firsthand encounter with the human consequences of wrongful conviction. One year he became lost while traveling to New York and could not explain coherently what had happened at the airport. Stevenson later found him looking much as usual, though somewhat down, and learned that McMillian’s junkyard business was struggling. The account does not locate that later visit in Montgomery; it shows instead how the city remained the point to which Stevenson returned between teaching and the work of the organization.

A Planned Stop After Release

When McMillian’s conviction and death sentence were invalidated and he was released, Stevenson went to the jail with a suit for him. The prison had refused to let McMillian take his possessions to the courthouse because it would not acknowledge that he might be freed. They therefore still had to return to Holman Prison for his belongings before going to the homecoming celebration. Stevenson had also reserved a hotel room in Montgomery, expecting that McMillian would be safest there for the next few nights.

The hotel reservation made Montgomery a provisional landing place: freedom had been restored, but the practical consequences of years in prison had not disappeared. Stevenson told McMillian about a painful conversation with Minnie, who did not seem able to talk with him when he returned. McMillian was surprised and hurt, but did not dwell on it. He insisted that the day was happy because he had his freedom back. The city’s role in this moment is logistical and protective, set against a release that brought joy while leaving relationships and injuries unresolved.

Temporary Care and a Narrowing Future

Years later, as McMillian’s condition deteriorated, his family and the Equal Justice Initiative tried to find a stable place for him to live. A move to Huntsville, where a relative could provide consistent care, worked for a time, but McMillian became agitated and ran out of money. He returned to Monroeville, where his sister Katie Lee watched over him; for a while he did better, before declining again.

The next step required a facility for elderly and infirm people. Many places refused him because he had a felony conviction. Explaining that the conviction was wrongful and that he had been proved innocent did not persuade them to admit him. Maria Morrison, the organization’s social worker, worked with McMillian and his family to locate suitable care. She eventually found a place in Montgomery that would accept him for a short stay of no more than ninety days, giving the family and staff time to consider what could come next. The temporary limit matters: Montgomery offered an immediate placement, not a settled solution, and the search itself exposed how the consequences of a wrongful conviction could persist even after exoneration.

A Point on Another Journey

Montgomery also appears as a brief passage in George Daniel’s story. Disoriented and talking loudly to himself, he remained on a bus that had gone through the city, where he had family, rather than getting off there. In January, with no money and no shoes, he was eventually forced off the bus in Hurtsboro. The account gives no further role to Montgomery in what followed, but the contrast is stark: the city was a possible point of connection for someone in crisis, while the journey carried him onward into an unfamiliar place and a fatal encounter with police.

Taken together, these appearances make Montgomery less a single dramatic setting than a working hub and a waypoint. Lawyers arrive there to join a case; Stevenson returns there to continue running the organization; a hotel is reserved there for a newly freed man; and, much later, a temporary care placement is found there when ordinary arrangements fail. Its recurring importance lies in these acts of continuation and care, alongside the limits of what even a place of refuge can provide.