Racial bias in the criminal justice system

Racial bias in the criminal justice system is not confined to openly prejudiced individuals: it operates through laws, discretionary choices, public narratives, and rules that determine whose testimony is believed and who receives punishment. The book traces that structure from the policing of interracial relationships and the exclusion of Black jurors to the treatment of Walter McMillian’s alibi, press coverage that cast him as dangerous, and sentencing systems that disregard the circumstances of children and poor defendants. These examples show how an official account can acquire authority even when a community’s knowledge and the evidence point elsewhere.

Historical foundations and racial hierarchy

The account links present-day criminal justice to a longer history in which control over race and intimacy helped preserve white supremacy. After Reconstruction collapsed, voting rights were taken from African Americans and racially restrictive laws reasserted their subordination. So-called racial integrity laws, alongside prohibitions on interracial sex and marriage, were not incidental restrictions: they helped reproduce a racial hierarchy after slavery and were also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Law enforcement in many Southern communities treated investigating and punishing Black men’s intimacy with white women as part of its duty.

This history gives Walter McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly a significance beyond private conduct. When McMillian testified in a custody hearing involving Kelly’s children, he acknowledged being her friend but was spared intrusive questioning after her lawyer objected. The courtroom encounter nevertheless changed how others regarded him. People who had known him chiefly as a hard-working pulpwood man came to see him as a more threatening figure. The shift illustrates how racialized fears about sex and relationships could transform a person’s standing and feed the assumptions through which authorities interpreted him.

Unequal access to juries

The persistence of racial exclusion in jury selection reveals how formal legal change could coexist with practices that preserved white control. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. Political and judicial boundaries had been arranged to maintain white majorities in circuits that included majority-Black counties. The growing electoral participation of African Americans brought greater attention to Black residents’ concerns, but that attention did not necessarily produce substantive changes in prosecutorial practice.

Jury selection carried a similar history. Although the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding Black people from jury service was unconstitutional, all-white juries remained common. Jury rolls drawn from voter lists excluded African Americans when they were denied the vote; later, officials used standards such as being intelligent and upright to keep Black people and women off jury lists. Court rulings in the 1970s challenged underrepresentation in jury pools, but they did not require that minorities or women actually serve. Peremptory strikes remained a powerful way to remove Black prospective jurors, and the evidentiary standard for proving discriminatory use of those strikes had prevented successful challenges for twenty years.

The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made it easier to challenge racially discriminatory strikes, but it did not end the struggle over who would sit in judgment. McMillian, held on death row before trial, heard other prisoners discuss the racial makeup of the jury he might face. He chose to leave legal strategy to his lawyers, yet the possibility of an all-white jury remained a source of concern. In a county that was 40 percent Black, the prospect of a jury that did not reflect the community was not an abstraction; it was part of the practical risk of a capital trial.

Whose account counts as evidence

In McMillian’s case, Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man, but their warnings did not displace the accusations against him. Tate had not investigated McMillian’s life, background, or whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew about McMillian’s affair with Karen Kelly and had heard rumors that his independence meant he was involved in drugs. Those suspicions, together with Ralph Myers’s accusation, were enough for Tate to proceed without establishing whether McMillian could have committed the crime.

The neglected alibi was concrete. On the day Ronda Morrison was murdered, a fish fry took place at McMillian’s home. His sister, Evelyn Smith, and her family sometimes raised money for church by selling food from his front yard, which stood closer to the main road. At least a dozen church parishioners were there with McMillian and his family that morning. McMillian was also replacing his truck’s transmission with help from his mechanic friend, Jimmy Hunter: by 9:30, they had dismantled the truck and removed the transmission; by 11, relatives had arrived and started frying food for sale. These details make the contrast between available community knowledge and the prosecution’s accepted account especially sharp.

Years later, when McMillian’s lawyer challenged prosecutor Tom Chapman about the community’s belief in McMillian’s innocence, Chapman dismissed those views as uninformed and said his job was to defend the conviction. The exchange exposes a struggle over who could claim to possess facts: local residents and people who said they had been with McMillian were treated as having opinions, while the State’s case retained its authority despite doubts about the testimony supporting it. The later recantation by Myers—who answered that his trial testimony was not true—made that imbalance visible in court, but it did not mean that earlier warnings had been given equal weight when they might have prevented the conviction.

Media, authority, and the public story

The press helped turn suspicion into a durable public identity. Local newspapers portrayed McMillian as a drug kingpin, a sexual predator, and a gang leader, and reported that he was the leader of an alleged burglary, theft, forgery, and drug-smuggling ring. Coverage of the hearings emphasized metal detectors, security officers, and danger. Even after evidence was presented that he had nothing to do with another murder attributed to him, headlines revived the claim that he was connected to the killing of other girls. Repetition made the image of a dangerous man more prominent than the question of whether the evidence established his guilt.

That local hostility existed alongside a national legal history in which Southern officials had used defamation suits to suppress sympathetic coverage of civil rights activism. In 1960, The New York Times published an advertisement titled Heed Their Rising Voices to raise money for Martin Luther King Jr.’s defense against perjury charges in Alabama. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor John Patterson sued the newspaper, and a local jury awarded them half a million dollars. The case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, whose ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan required public officials to prove actual malice in defamation claims. The decision strengthened press freedom, but hostility toward national media persisted in the South.

McMillian’s lawyers therefore faced competing dangers in seeking publicity. They believed national coverage might help make his eventual release safer by countering a local story that had depicted him as a menace. At the same time, publicity could prejudice a possible new trial, and his lawyers feared it would not help the appeal already before the Court of Criminal Appeals. The media strategy was thus not a simple choice between silence and exposure: public understanding might protect McMillian outside prison, while a hostile or distorted public narrative could further narrow the possibility of a fair proceeding.

Race, poverty, and punishment

The book places racial bias within a broader account of who bears the consequences of severe punishment. In its discussion of juvenile life without parole, the argument to the Court was that these sentences were imposed disproportionately on children of color and applied harsh penalties designed for adult career criminals to children. The United States was described as the only country imposing life imprisonment without parole on children, despite international law banning the practice. The cases of Terrance Graham and Joe Sullivan made visible how race and age could shape exposure to an extreme sentence, even when the governing punishment was presented as neutral.

Trina Garnett’s case shows the force of poverty, childhood, and mental illness within that structure. She was the youngest of twelve children in a poor section of Chester, Pennsylvania, where nearly 46 percent of children lived below the federal poverty level and the public school system ranked last among the state’s 501 districts. Her home was marked by severe violence, and her mother’s death, abuse, and hardship intensified her mental health problems. After a fire killed two boys, Trina, fourteen, and her friend Francis Newsome maintained that it had been accidental. Trina was so traumatized and unable to function that her appointed lawyer thought she might be incompetent, yet he did not file the motions or present the evidence needed to support that finding, nor did he challenge her trial as an adult. Newsome testified against her in exchange for having the charges dropped. Although the judge found that Trina had no intent to kill, Pennsylvania law required life without parole for second-degree murder and did not allow him to account for her age, mental illness, poverty, abuse, or the circumstances of the fire.

The same attention to gender and material conditions appears in the account of Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. Built in the 1940s and named for an advocate of prisoners’ education and humane confinement, it had become dangerously overcrowded; courts had repeatedly found its conditions unconstitutional, and it held almost twice the number of women it was designed for. Women were packed into dormitories and improvised spaces, with serious mental illness and severe emotional problems left to collide in the same crowded environment. Against that setting, the book notes that the number of women sent to prison rose 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, while nearly two-thirds of incarcerated women were serving time for nonviolent, low-level drug or property crimes. These details broaden the account beyond a single wrongful conviction: punishment falls through systems shaped by poverty, gender, race, and limited access to meaningful support.

Historical memory and the death penalty

The book’s historical frame ultimately connects racial terror to the modern death penalty. It identifies slavery, the reign of terror that followed Reconstruction, mass incarceration, and the criminalization of mental illness as institutions that have shaped American ideas about race and justice. Older Black Southerners objected when commentators described domestic terrorism as new after September 11, recalling that police, the Ku Klux Klan, and white people could terrorize Black communities through bombings, lynchings, and racial violence. The account presents lynching not as a separate, finished past but as part of the history that formed the country’s willingness to execute quickly, in part redirecting lynching’s violence while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment.

Across these histories and cases, racial bias appears not only in explicit rules but in the repeated assignment of credibility and danger. A community’s knowledge can be discounted, a defendant’s private relationship can magnify suspicion, and a press narrative can make harsh treatment seem necessary before the evidence has been tested. The result is a system in which neutral-sounding procedures may preserve unequal outcomes—and in which challenging a conviction requires confronting not just a mistaken fact, but the institutions that made one account believable and another easy to ignore.