Racial profiling and presumption of guilt

Racial profiling and presumption of guilt are presented as both everyday acts of misrecognition and institutional patterns that shape criminal justice. A judge can look at a Black lawyer in a suit at the defense table and assume he is an accused person waiting for his attorney; a jury-selection system can exclude Black citizens while formally denying that race is the reason. The book follows these moments back through racial history, showing how suspicion and unequal treatment are reinforced by courtroom practices, public memory, and the unequal power to be heard.

Everyday Presumptions and Their Accumulation

While preparing for a hearing in a Midwestern courtroom, Bryan Stevenson sat at counsel table wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. A judge and prosecutor entered through a rear door, laughing. Seeing Stevenson, the judge sharply told him he should not be in the courtroom without counsel and should wait in the hallway until his lawyer arrived. Stevenson stood and identified himself as the lawyer on the case set for that morning. The judge laughed at the mistake, and the prosecutor joined in.

Stevenson forced himself to laugh too. His client was a white child being prosecuted as an adult, and he did not want to create a conflict with the judge that might disadvantage the child before the hearing began. The moment therefore carried two effects at once: Stevenson managed the immediate risk to his client, while absorbing the indignity of being presumed not to be a lawyer in the place where he was entitled to appear as one. The book distinguishes an individual mistake from the harm of repeated racial presumptions. Being suspected, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and feared becomes a burden that cannot be understood apart from the history that makes such assumptions seem ordinary.

The narrative gives that presumption a stark courtroom counterpart in Walter McMillian’s case. When Stevenson entered the courtroom, a large metal detector had been placed just inside the door, with an enormous German shepherd held by a police officer beyond it. The benches that had held McMillian’s supporters the previous day were 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 the State’s supporters had been admitted. Stevenson challenged the exclusion with the judge. The imbalance was not merely an abstract question of representation: it determined who could be present in the room as the case was heard.

Race, Intimacy, and the Manufacture of Suspicion

The treatment of McMillian also sits within a long history of racial suspicion directed at Black men in relationships with white women. His relationship with Karen Kelly became public through a custody hearing after he received a subpoena from her husband. Nervous and unable to consult his wife, Minnie, McMillian went to court and acknowledged being Karen’s friend. Her lawyer objected to crude questions about the nature of that friendship, so McMillian did not have to give further details. But anger toward him was palpable as he left. News spread, and his standing in the community changed: he was no longer known to white residents chiefly as a hardworking pulpwood man, but as something more threatening.

The book places that change against the history of laws and customs that policed interracial intimacy. After slavery, racial hierarchy and segregation were maintained in part by prohibitions on interracial sex and marriage. The term miscegenation was coined by supporters of slavery in the 1860s to stir fear of interracial relationships and the racial mixing they imagined would follow emancipation. For more than a century, law-enforcement officials in many Southern communities treated investigating and punishing Black men who had been intimate with white women as part of their duty. The suspicion directed at McMillian thus rested on more than gossip: it drew force from a legal and social order that made interracial intimacy itself a target.

That order survived the end of Reconstruction in Alabama. After federal troops left in the 1870s, Black voting rights were taken away and racially restrictive laws restored white supremacy and subordination. So-called racial-integrity laws helped reproduce slavery’s hierarchy and were also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. The book presents the policing of intimacy as one strand of a wider racial project: relationships, political participation, and bodily autonomy could all be subjected to rules that protected the same hierarchy.

Jury Selection and Institutional Exclusion

The presumption of guilt also operates through the composition of juries. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. As Black residents exercised their voting rights in the 1970s, some prosecutors and judges worried about the effect of changing racial demographics on reelection. County boundaries were arranged to maintain white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. These conditions shaped who exercised authority even before a particular defendant entered court.

In a county such as Monroe County, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors had often excluded every Black person from jury service in serious felony cases. The United States Supreme Court had held in Strauder v. West Virginia in the 1880s that excluding Black people from juries was unconstitutional, yet all-white juries persisted for decades. In the Deep South, jury lists drawn from voter rolls kept Black citizens out when they were denied the vote. After the Voting Rights Act, clerks and judges continued to use other means of exclusion; commissions could invoke requirements that jurors be intelligent and upright to exclude Black people and women. Later rulings against underrepresentation in jury pools brought some Black citizens to the courthouse, but did not guarantee that they would actually serve.

Peremptory strikes preserved another route to exclusion. Although the Court had ruled in the mid-1960s that using such strikes discriminatorily was unconstitutional, it set an evidentiary standard so demanding that no successful challenge had been brought in the following twenty years. Striking all or nearly all Black potential jurors continued. In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made it more possible to challenge racially discriminatory peremptory strikes, offering hope to Black defendants while also prompting prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. McMillian heard these histories from other prisoners during the months before trial. He had decided to leave legal work to his lawyers, but remained deeply concerned about race and the jury he would face.

From Individual Cases to Racial History

The book treats racial profiling as a structure of expectations, not only as an explicit accusation. Its account of Victoria Banks shows how race, disability, and vulnerability to coercion could converge in a criminal case. Banks was a Black woman with an intellectual disability in Choctaw County, Alabama. Police accused her of killing a newborn even though they had no credible basis for believing she had ever been pregnant. After she allegedly told a deputy she was pregnant to avoid jail for an unrelated matter, officers later saw her without a child and accused her of killing one. Without adequate legal help, she was coerced into pleading guilty alongside her sister to killing a child who had never existed. She accepted a twenty-year prison sentence while facing capital-murder charges and a possible death sentence. Her freedom came only after it was established that she had undergone a tubal ligation five years earlier and could not have conceived or given birth. The case makes concrete how an initial presumption can survive in the absence of basic verification, while the person accused bears the burden of disproving it.

The historical frame widens further in the book’s account of racial terror. An older Black man told Stevenson that the language of domestic terrorism after September 11, 2001, ignored the terror experienced by Black communities for generations: police, the Ku Klux Klan, and white people could terrorize them through bombings, lynchings, and other racial violence. The narrative links lynching to the development of the modern death penalty, arguing that speedy executions partly redirected the violent energies of lynch mobs while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price. Under this account, presumption of guilt is not simply a bias that appears at the moment of arrest; it is part of a history in which racial power has shaped both the threat of violence and the forms through which punishment is administered.

The public memory surrounding Monroeville sharpens the contrast. The town celebrated Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, marketed the story and its connection to the place, turned the old courthouse into a museum, and formed a troupe that performed the story for wider audiences. Readers admired Atticus Finch as a model of courageous advocacy. Yet Tom Robinson, the Black defendant falsely accused in the novel, is convicted; in despair, he tries to escape prison and is shot seventeen times in the back. The book observes that sentimental celebration of the story can leave its harder truths unabsorbed. That contrast echoes the larger argument: a society may praise a story about racial injustice, and even honor its fictional defender, while remaining slow to recognize the real practices through which suspicion, exclusion, and unequal punishment endure.