Racial bias shaping criminal justice

Racial bias shaping criminal justice is presented not as a collection of isolated prejudices but as a structure in which history, law, and routine institutional decisions reinforce one another. In Walter McMillian’s case, racialized suspicion helped make a weak accusation seem credible, while the community’s knowledge of his whereabouts and the testimony challenging the prosecution struggled to receive equal institutional weight. The book traces that imbalance from the history of racial control into the everyday operations of courts, and argues that meaningful reform requires confronting both.

Historical Architecture

The book connects modern racial bias to the effort to preserve racial hierarchy after slavery. During Reconstruction, the federal government promised equality to formerly enslaved people; after federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, voting rights were taken away and restrictive laws restored white political dominance. Laws against interracial sex and marriage were part of this project. Their history reflected a broader fear of relationships such as the one between Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly: supporters of slavery had promoted the term miscegenation in the 1860s to stoke fear of interracial intimacy and racial mixing. In many Southern communities, law enforcement came to regard investigating and punishing Black men who had been intimate with white women as part of its duty.

The book situates that history within a sequence of institutions that shaped American understandings of race and justice. After the collapse of Reconstruction came a reign of terror that lasted until World War II, followed by Jim Crow, the legalized segregation and suppression of basic rights. The terror of lynching helped create the modern death penalty: speedy executions partly redirected the violence of lynching while reassuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment. These histories are not treated as safely concluded chapters. Their effects persist in racial profiling, in assumptions about guilt, and in whose experiences are recognized as credible or worthy of protection.

Suspicion and the McMillian Prosecution

The prosecution of Walter McMillian shows how racialized assumptions could substitute for investigation. Black residents told Sheriff Tom Tate that he had arrested the wrong man, but Tate had not investigated McMillian’s background or established where he had been on the day of the murder. He knew of McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly and had heard rumors that McMillian’s independence meant he was dealing drugs. In his eagerness to make an arrest, those suspicions were enough for him to accept Ralph Myers’s accusations.

The details of the day offered a substantial counter-account. A fish fry was held in McMillian’s front yard to raise money for a church. At least a dozen parishioners were there with McMillian and his family that morning. McMillian had no tree-cutting job; he and his mechanic friend Jimmy Hunter had taken apart the transmission of McMillian’s truck by 9:30 a.m., and relatives began preparing food to sell around 11. These concrete circumstances, along with community members’ testimony, contradicted the prosecution’s account. Yet the indictment brought relief to a town unsettled by the unsolved murder, and officials criticized for failing to solve it were cheered. The public desire for an arrest and the racialized suspicions surrounding McMillian helped the accusation acquire authority before the underlying facts had been properly examined.

The pressure of race also shaped how the relationship with Karen Kelly was understood. When McMillian was subpoenaed to testify in a child-custody dispute between the Kellys, he acknowledged being Karen’s friend but was spared further details after her lawyer objected to the husband’s crude questions. Outside the courtroom, anger toward McMillian was palpable. His local reputation shifted: he was no longer known chiefly as a hardworking pulpwood man, but had become a more troubling figure in the eyes of white residents. The book places this change in reputation against a history in which intimacy between Black men and white women was treated as a threat to racial hierarchy and, at times, as grounds for law-enforcement action.

Credibility, Juries, and Courtroom Power

The book shows racial inequality operating not only through the choice of a defendant but also through the selection of juries. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. Legislative boundaries had been arranged to preserve white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. Ted Pearson, the district attorney prosecuting McMillian, knew that Black residents believed McMillian was innocent, but remained confident that he could win a conviction despite doubts about the testimony of Myers and Bill Hooks.

The jury system had long offered ways to exclude Black people even as formal legal rules prohibited racial discrimination. In Deep South states, jury rolls were drawn from voting rolls, which historically excluded African Americans. Later, local officials could use requirements that jurors be intelligent and upright to keep Black people and women off jury commissions’ lists. Court decisions in the 1970s addressed underrepresentation in jury pools, but did not require that minorities or women actually serve. Peremptory strikes remained a powerful barrier: discriminatory use had been ruled unconstitutional, yet the evidentiary standard for proving racial bias was so difficult that no successful challenge had been brought in twenty years. In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made such challenges more direct, offering hope to Black defendants while also forcing prosecutors to find more creative means of exclusion. McMillian, facing trial in a county that was 40 percent Black, feared that he could still be judged by an all-white jury, as often happened in death-penalty cases.

Unequal access to the courtroom made the same power visible in a more immediate form. At a hearing in McMillian’s case, a metal detector and a large German shepherd stood inside the courtroom entrance. The benches that had held McMillian’s supporters the previous day were now mostly occupied by older white people supporting the Morrisons and the prosecution. McMillian’s family and supporters had been told they could not enter, although supporters of the State had been admitted. The contrast made courtroom access itself part of the contest over whose presence and account would be heard.

Evidence and Institutional Retaliation

The book’s account of credibility extends beyond the courtroom. Darnell Houston, an alibi witness, called after being arrested and told that he had been indicted for perjury. He said he had not been contacted by McMillian’s lawyers since giving them a statement a year earlier. The narrator regarded the indictment, issued without investigation or compelling evidence that Houston had lied, as punishment for speaking with the defense. When Bryan Stevenson confronted prosecutor Tom Chapman, Chapman dismissed the opinions of people who believed McMillian innocent as uninformed and said that his job was to defend the conviction. Stevenson argued that a perjury charge without clear and convincing evidence could intimidate witnesses and discourage people from bringing forward evidence that contradicted the State’s case. In this account, legal process could be used not only to evaluate testimony but also to make challenging the official account perilous.

The later post-conviction proceedings expose another disparity between evidence and institutional response. Because the appeal was pending and the State did not have to provide its police files, the defense filed an Alabama Rule 32 petition to return to trial court, seek discovery, and present new evidence. The petition raised claims including ineffective counsel, nondisclosure, innocence, and police and prosecutorial misconduct. After it drew attention in Monroeville, it was transferred to Baldwin County; the new Monroe County judges had not wanted to take it up, and the transfer followed the theory that post-conviction proceedings belonged in the county of the trial. Judge Norton ultimately denied relief in a terse two-and-a-half-page order. It addressed Myers’s testimony but not the other dozen-plus witnesses or the legal claims, and cited no case law. The book sets that narrow treatment against the breadth of the defense evidence, showing how an institution can preserve a judgment without fully engaging the challenge to it.

Naming the Structure and Seeking Change

The Equal Justice Initiative’s work joins individual litigation to a broader account of racial history. When Bryan Stevenson explained the organization’s aims to Rosa Parks, Johnnie Carr, and Virginia Durr, he described work to help people on death row, challenge excessive punishment and prison conditions, free people wrongly convicted, address racial bias, support poor people and those without adequate legal help, assist people with mental illness, and prevent children from being placed in adult jails and prisons. He also described efforts to confront poverty, diversify decision-making, teach racial history, and challenge abuse of power by police and prosecutors. The breadth of that work reflects the book’s insistence that wrongful convictions cannot be separated from the conditions that shape whose claims are taken seriously.

The organization’s race and poverty initiative made this historical approach practical. It produced a racial-history calendar for 2013 and 2014, worked with poor children and families in Black Belt counties, brought hundreds of high-school students to its office for education and discussion about rights and justice, and developed reports and materials on slavery, lynching, and racial injustice. The project connected those histories to contemporary criminal justice rather than treating them as background. For Stevenson, myths of racial difference continued to distort ideas about justice; prisons’ racial demographics, disproportionate sentences, targeted drug prosecutions in poor communities, the criminalization of immigrants, felony disenfranchisement, and barriers to reentry all required interpretation through the country’s racial history.

McMillian’s case gave that argument a human and institutional measure. It taught Stevenson that the system could treat people better when they were rich and guilty than when they were poor and innocent, and that fear and anger could make a community or state irrational and dangerous. The concept therefore encompasses more than biased attitudes: it names the chain through which historical hierarchy informs suspicion, influences which witnesses and defendants are believed, shapes who sits on juries and who enters courtrooms, and can leave a conviction standing despite substantial challenges. The book’s answer is not to detach present injustice from the past, but to make that connection visible and to build legal and educational work capable of contesting it.