Racial injustice in the criminal justice system

Racial injustice in the criminal justice system is not confined to openly racist acts or a single wrongful conviction. It is a durable structure in which history, legal procedure, public storytelling, and unequal access to resources reinforce one another. The prosecution of Walter McMillian makes that structure visible: suspicion attached to his interracial relationship, his alibi was discounted, and his supporters’ objections were dismissed, while official accusations and a threatening image of him circulated widely. Other cases extend the pattern to poor women, children, and people with disabilities, showing how race works alongside class, gender, age, and disability to determine who is heard and who is punished.

Historical Foundations

The account traces contemporary injustice to the racial order rebuilt after Reconstruction. Federal promises of equality for formerly enslaved people gave way, after federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, to the loss of Black voting rights and a succession of laws designed to reestablish racial subordination. Anti-miscegenation statutes made interracial intimacy a crime; racial-integrity laws sought to preserve the hierarchy associated with slavery and were also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. The prohibition of relationships between Black men and white women became an especially intense Southern preoccupation.

That history supplies context for the suspicion surrounding Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly. After Walter acknowledged their friendship in a custody hearing, the anger directed at him was palpable, and his local reputation changed: he was no longer known principally as a hardworking pulpwood worker but as a more troubling figure. The book connects this reaction to a long history in which law enforcement treated the policing of Black men’s intimacy with white women as part of its duty. The personal relationship did not establish guilt, but it helped make Walter legible to authorities and the public through a racialized story of danger.

The broader historical frame extends beyond Jim Crow laws. The narrative identifies slavery, the racial terror that followed Reconstruction, and the modern death penalty as connected institutions in American approaches to race and justice. Lynching’s racial terrorism, it argues, helped shape the modern death penalty: speedy executions could redirect the violence of lynching while reassuring white Southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price. This continuity does not make every present-day decision identical to past racial violence; it shows how inherited assumptions can survive through institutions and practices that appear formally different.

Suspicion, Credibility, and the McMillian Prosecution

Walter’s case illustrates how suspicion could substitute for investigation. Black residents told Sheriff Tate that authorities had arrested the wrong man, yet Tate had not investigated Walter’s background or whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew of Walter’s relationship with Karen Kelly and had heard rumors that Walter’s independence meant he was dealing drugs. Ralph Myers’s accusations, in this setting, were enough for Tate to accept a case without checking the account against the community’s knowledge.

That knowledge was concrete. On the day Ronda Morrison was murdered, Walter had no tree-cutting job. He was at home replacing the transmission in his truck with mechanic Jimmy Hunter. By 9:30 in the morning, they had dismantled the truck and removed the transmission. Later, Walter’s sister Evelyn Smith and other relatives fried food to sell in the front yard to raise money for the church. At least a dozen church parishioners were at the house that morning. These ordinary activities formed an alibi, but they did not prevent the authorities from proceeding on accusations that fit the existing suspicion of Walter.

The prosecution’s approach to dissent further exposed the struggle over whose knowledge counted. When Bryan Stevenson challenged prosecutor Tom Chapman about Walter’s supporters and the prosecution of Darnell Houston, Chapman dismissed community views as uninformed and insisted that his task was to defend the conviction. The case thus turned not only on disputed evidence but on the authority to define what counted as evidence: people who knew Walter were treated as lacking facts, while the prosecution’s position retained institutional force despite serious doubts about its witnesses.

Jury Selection and Unequal Procedure

Racial exclusion from juries persisted even after constitutional rulings against it. In Alabama in 1987, all forty elected district attorneys were white, including in a state with sixteen majority-Black counties. Political boundaries were drawn to preserve white majorities in judicial circuits containing majority-Black counties. In Monroe County, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors had often removed all Black prospective jurors from serious felony cases. Jury rolls drawn from voter lists excluded many African Americans; later, officials used standards such as being intelligent and upright to keep Black people and women off juries.

Legal reforms constrained some methods without ensuring diverse juries. The Supreme Court of the United States had ruled against excluding Black people from jury service in Strauder v. West Virginia, and later decisions challenged underrepresentation in jury pools. But the constitutional prohibition on racial exclusion did not guarantee that Black people would actually serve. Peremptory strikes remained a powerful means of removing them. Although the Court had condemned discriminatory use of such strikes in the 1960s, its standard for proving discrimination was so demanding that no successful challenge followed for twenty years. The 1986 Batson v. Kentucky decision made challenges more direct, but also required prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. Walter, held on death row before trial, followed this history with particular concern about the jury he would face.

The unequal procedure was visible in the courtroom as well as in jury selection. At one hearing, a metal detector and a German shepherd controlled entry; the benches that had held Walter’s supporters the previous day were now mostly occupied by older white people supporting the Morrisons and the prosecution. Walter’s family and supporters had been kept outside while the State’s supporters were admitted. The scene made access to the courtroom itself part of the contest over whose presence and account would be recognized.

Public Narratives and Institutional Power

Local coverage helped turn accusation into an apparent public fact. Newspapers in Monroeville and Mobile portrayed Walter as a dangerous drug dealer and attached labels such as drug kingpin, sexual predator, and gang leader to him. Headlines about alleged sexual misconduct and other supposed crimes enlarged the image of a threat even as evidence presented at a hearing challenged his connection to another murder. The press also emphasized the metal detector and courtroom security, details that invited readers to see Walter as dangerous before they considered the evidence against him.

The book places that local coverage beside a longer conflict over reporting on Southern racial injustice. Southern officials had used defamation suits against national media outlets that covered civil-rights activism sympathetically or criticized local authorities. New York Times v. Sullivan decision required public officials to prove actual malice, a landmark protection for press freedom. Yet the ruling also intensified contempt for the national press in the South. Bryan Stevenson feared that media attention could harm a pending appeal or make a new trial unfair, but the local narrative was already so hostile that the defense sought national coverage to make Walter’s innocence and the weakness of the case publicly understood. The dilemma was sharp: publicity could endanger legal efforts, while silence left a damaging account unchallenged.

Threats showed that this hostility was not merely rhetorical. In the month after a hearing, the office received a bomb threat; racist calls also targeted the legal team at home, and investigators had been followed while working in Monroe County. Police searched the office with dogs, found no bomb, and the staff returned to work after waiting an hour and a half. The threats placed advocacy itself within the racial conflict surrounding the case, while the prospect of Walter’s release raised a further question: whether the community would accept an innocent man once official and media accounts had cast him as a murderer.

Intersecting Vulnerabilities and Punishment

Other cases show that racial injustice operates through more than the treatment of Black men accused of violent crimes. In Chester, Pennsylvania, Trina Garnett grew up as the youngest of twelve children amid severe poverty, an abusive father, and a failing school system. After her mother’s death and years of trauma, fourteen-year-old Trina entered a house with a friend, lit matches to find the boys’ room, and a fire killed two sleeping children. Her appointed lawyer failed to pursue an incompetency determination or challenge her trial as an adult. Although the judge found she had no intent to kill, Pennsylvania’s mandatory sentence for second-degree murder left no room to consider her age, mental illness, poverty, abuse, or the circumstances of the fire. She was sentenced to life without parole.

The prosecution of Marsha Colbey likewise demonstrates how poverty and gender shaped the treatment of infant death. Only weeks after delivering a stillborn son, she was arrested for capital murder after a state pathologist initially declared the baby had been born alive without an adequate basis for that conclusion. At trial, the pathologist’s claim that the infant had been born alive and drowned was challenged by medical witnesses, including the State’s own expert. The account places her case alongside a broader pattern in which unexplained deaths of children born to poor women were treated as evidence of criminality; all five women then on Alabama’s death row had been condemned for the unexplained deaths of young children or the deaths of abusive partners.

Victoria Banks’s case makes the consequences of disability and inadequate representation especially stark. An intellectually disabled Black woman, she was accused of killing a newborn despite there being no credible basis to believe she had been pregnant. She and her sister accepted a twenty-year prison sentence under the threat of capital charges. Investigators did not substantiate her claim before sending her to prison; relief came when evidence of a tubal ligation established that she could not have conceived or given birth. Joe Sullivan’s case shows a related intersection of childhood, disability, abuse, and racial disparity. Arrested at thirteen, he read at a first-grade level, had endured physical abuse and severe neglect, and had lived at ten or more addresses in three years. After a one-day trial, a six-person jury convicted him, and the judge imposed life without parole. The account contrasts his circumstances with the language of recidivism used to justify a sentence that treated a child as beyond change.

The stakes of these cases reach beyond individual outcomes. At the Supreme Court argument challenging life-without-parole sentences for children, the defense argued that the United States stood alone in imposing such sentences on children, that the practice disproportionately affected children of color, and that punishments designed for career adult offenders were being applied to juveniles. The contrast between two death-row cases also shows how procedural decisions can determine whether racial bias receives a remedy: James “Bo” Cochran won a new trial after federal courts reversed his conviction for jury-selection bias, and a racially diverse jury acquitted him; Robert Tarver was executed after the prosecutor acknowledged discriminatory jury selection, because the defense lawyer had failed to make an adequate objection and courts refused review. Across these examples, racial injustice appears not as one rule operating in isolation, but as the accumulated effect of who is suspected, who is believed, who has competent representation, and whose procedural failures are allowed to become final.