Ralph Myers’s false testimony implicating Walter McMillian

Ralph Myers’s false testimony implicating Walter McMillian transformed an accusation into a capital conviction: Myers’s account was the only trial evidence that, according to the defense, connected McMillian to Ronda Morrison’s murder. Years later, Myers repudiated that account under oath, stating that he had not seen McMillian on the day of the crime and that his allegations were lies. The reversal made their relationship central to the effort to undo the conviction, while raising a larger question about why a contested accusation had been treated as proof.

How the accusation gained force

The case unfolded in a community eager for an arrest. After Morrison’s murder, the absence of a charge had disrupted life in Monroeville; when McMillian was indicted, people welcomed the news and praised law-enforcement officials who had faced criticism. Yet people who knew McMillian found the accusation difficult to believe: he had no known history of crime or violence, and robbery seemed inconsistent with a life of hard work. Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man. The investigation had not established McMillian’s background or whereabouts on the day of the crime before Tate accepted Myers’s accusations, amid rumors about McMillian’s independence and his relationship with Karen Kelly.

That relationship carried a meaning beyond the private facts of an affair. When Kelly’s husband subpoenaed McMillian in the custody dispute, McMillian acknowledged being her friend but was spared questions about the nature of that friendship after her lawyer objected. The anger he encountered leaving court became public talk, and his standing changed: he was no longer known chiefly as a hardworking pulpwood worker, but had become a more troubling figure in white eyes. The book places this shift within a long history in which laws and customs policed intimacy between Black men and white women. Anti-miscegenation statutes were part of a racial order built after slavery, and Southern law enforcement had often treated intimacy across the color line as something to investigate and punish. In that context, suspicion surrounding McMillian’s relationship could help make him seem criminal without supplying evidence that he had committed murder.

The prosecution’s case also depended on a broader legal setting in which Black residents had reason to distrust the promise of an impartial trial. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, including those serving a state with sixteen majority-Black counties. In Monroe County, Alabama, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors could still use discretionary peremptory strikes to keep Black people off juries. The Supreme Court of the United States had repeatedly condemned racial exclusion, but the evidentiary standard for challenging discriminatory strikes had long made successful challenges elusive. The 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky offered a more direct way to contest such strikes, while leaving prosecutors room to seek other methods of exclusion. McMillian, held on death row before trial, heard other prisoners warn him about race and the kind of jury he might face.

A case resting on one witness

At McMillian’s post-conviction hearing, his lawyer emphasized how little corroborated Myers’s trial account. Myers had testified that, on November 1, 1986, McMillian asked him to drive McMillian’s truck because his arm hurt; that they went to the cleaners where Morrison worked; and that Myers saw McMillian with a gun and money in a brown bag. Myers also described a white man present at the scene, supposedly directing events, who was never identified or arrested. The defense argued that this supposed third participant did not exist and that the State had no physical evidence, motive, or eyewitness to establish McMillian’s guilt apart from Myers’s testimony.

There was evidence pointing in the other direction. On the day Morrison was murdered, a fish fry took place at McMillian’s house to raise money for a church. His sister, Evelyn Smith, and her family sold food from the roadside, and at least a dozen parishioners were at the house with McMillian during the morning. McMillian had no tree-cutting job that day: he and his mechanic friend, Jimmy Hunter, dismantled the truck to replace its transmission, removing it by 9:30 a.m. Relatives arrived and began frying food by 11. These circumstances made the prosecution’s account of McMillian driving his truck to the crime scene especially consequential to test—and made the decision to rely on Myers without adequately investigating McMillian’s whereabouts all the more striking.

The defense also described the pressures Myers said he had faced. In a private interview lasting more than two hours, Myers alleged that the sheriff and the Alabama Bureau of Investigation pressured him and threatened him with the death penalty if he did not testify against McMillian. He said he had tried to recant before and had told people, including officials in the district attorney’s office, that he had been coerced. He further admitted that he had known nothing about Morrison’s murder. These were Myers’s claims, not facts established merely by his telling them, but they directly challenged the State’s account of how its principal witness had come to testify.

The recantation in court

The recantation became unmistakable when Myers took the stand at the evidentiary hearing. His lawyer first reminded the court that Myers had prior felony convictions and a separate capital murder case pending in Escambia County when he testified at McMillian’s trial. He then asked whether that testimony was true. Myers answered, “Not at all.” Asked whether he had seen McMillian on the day Morrison was murdered, Myers answered, “Absolutely not.” Those brief responses reversed the meaning of the testimony on which McMillian had been convicted and sentenced to death.

The examination proceeded through the allegations one by one. Myers said none of his claims implicating McMillian in the murder was true. Using the trial transcript, McMillian’s lawyer walked him through each statement; Myers acknowledged that his earlier testimony had been false. During cross-examination, prosecutor Tom Chapman challenged the change and suggested someone had prompted it. Myers remained firm, saying that the accusations against McMillian were lies and that he had not seen him on the day in question. The courtroom’s reaction—murmurs after his first answer and visible support from those attending for McMillian—showed how much turned on whether this recantation would be believed.

The dispute was not simply over whether Myers had changed his story. Chapman told McMillian’s lawyer that people who believed McMillian innocent had only uninformed opinions, and insisted that evidence implicated him and that his own role was to defend the conviction. The exchange exposed a conflict over who could define what counted as knowledge: residents who said McMillian was elsewhere were discounted as uninformed, while the State continued to rely on the witness whose testimony the defense said had been coerced and whose trial account had no physical corroboration. The contrast was sharpened by the courtroom itself. On the day after Myers’s testimony, a metal detector and a German shepherd stood inside the entrance; many of the seats that had held McMillian’s supporters were occupied by older white supporters of the Morrisons and the prosecution, while McMillian’s family and supporters had been kept outside. The hearing offered a route for the recantation to be heard, but the conditions of that hearing did not erase the unequal standing of the people contesting the conviction.

What the recantation could—and could not—change

Myers’s reversal struck at the foundation of the conviction, but it did not immediately secure relief. Thomas B. Norton issued a terse order denying the defense’s request. The order addressed Myers’s testimony but not the legal claims or the testimony of more than a dozen other witnesses, and it cited no case law. The gap between the force of the recantation in court and the narrowness of the written ruling became another part of the story: even direct repudiation by the State’s central witness did not compel the trial judge to reopen the judgment.

The relationship between Myers and McMillian is therefore defined by both the harm of the original accusation and the limits of its later reversal. Myers had helped place an innocent man on death row, and his eventual testimony supplied a direct account of the accusation’s falsity and of the pressure he said produced it. But the recantation had to contend with a prosecution committed to defending its conviction, a system in which racial suspicion could lend an affair the appearance of motive, and a hearing process that could receive new testimony without giving it decisive effect. The reversal exposed the weakness of the case against McMillian; the denial of relief showed that exposing that weakness and remedying it were not the same thing.