The State of Alabama is both the setting for individual struggles against wrongful conviction and a case study in how historical racial hierarchy can persist through ordinary legal institutions. The book connects the state’s death penalty and jury practices to the history of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, while tracing efforts to secure lawyers for condemned people and to contest punishment imposed on poor, Black, and otherwise vulnerable residents.

Historical and Political Setting

The account places Alabama’s contemporary criminal justice system in a longer history of racial control. After federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, the promise of racial equality made during Reconstruction gave way to the return of white supremacy. African Americans lost voting rights, and racially restrictive laws restored and enforced a hierarchy rooted in slavery. Laws against interracial sex and marriage formed part of that order; 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.

That history gives particular weight to the relationship between Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly. When McMillian was subpoenaed in a child-custody dispute involving Kelly, his decision to acknowledge that he was her friend became public. The reputation of a hardworking pulpwood worker changed: white residents came to associate him with a relationship that challenged longstanding racial prohibitions. The book presents this shift not as a private matter alone, but as an instance of how racialized fears about intimacy could influence the way a Black man was viewed and treated.

The state’s political structure also shaped who could exercise power locally. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, although sixteen counties had Black majorities. As African Americans exercised voting rights, legislators aligned counties in ways that maintained white majorities in judicial circuits containing majority-Black counties. The resulting political landscape placed Black residents’ concerns about prosecutions alongside institutions whose leadership remained overwhelmingly white.

Capital Punishment and Access to Counsel

When Bryan Stevenson encountered McMillian’s case, Alabama had nearly a hundred people on death row and the fastest-growing condemned population in the country. Yet the state had no public defender system, leaving large numbers of people facing execution without legal representation. The shortage of counsel was not an abstraction: Stevenson had already worked on death penalty cases across several Southern states, sometimes obtaining a stay only minutes before an electrocution was scheduled, and now faced a growing caseload in Alabama.

In 1988, Stevenson and Eva Ansley identified federal funding that could help establish a legal center for people on death row. Their first plan was to open in Tuscaloosa, but the project quickly encountered institutional and financial obstacles. The first director resigned, the University of Alabama School of Law withdrew its support and promised office space, and the state legislature denied funding needed to obtain federal matching dollars. Although some state bar leaders supported the effort because condemned people lacked legal assistance, others wanted executions to proceed faster and believed that the absence of counsel was slowing them down. Stevenson and Ansley regrouped in Montgomery and raised money themselves; the project eventually became the Equal Justice Initiative.

The center’s early circumstances reflected the fragility of that work. Its Montgomery office occupied a rented two-story Greek Revival house built in 1882, near Old Alabama Town. The yellow building and welcoming porch offered a contrast to the courtrooms, institutional waiting rooms, and prison walls that shaped clients’ families’ lives. But practical limits were constant: the office was cold in winter, squirrels got into the attic, and running a copier and coffeepot at the same time could blow a fuse. Ansley managed demanding federal reporting and accounting requirements while the small staff tried to keep the project operating.

Jury Selection and the McMillian Case

Alabama’s jury practices reveal how formal legal rules could coexist with persistent exclusion. In counties such as Monroe County, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors had often excluded all African Americans from serious felony juries. Even after the United States Supreme Court declared racial exclusion from jury service unconstitutional in Strauder v. West Virginia, all-white juries persisted for decades. Jury rolls drawn from voter registration lists excluded Black residents when they were prevented from voting; later, officials used selection practices and supposedly neutral standards to keep jury pools largely white.

The United States Supreme Court had ruled in the 1960s that racially discriminatory use of peremptory strikes was unconstitutional, but the standard for proving discrimination was so demanding that no challenge had succeeded in twenty years. The practice of striking all or almost all Black prospective jurors therefore continued. In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made it more possible to challenge prosecutors directly over discriminatory strikes, although it also gave prosecutors an incentive to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors. McMillian, held on death row before trial, heard other prisoners discuss race and the jury he might face; he was concerned about what their accounts meant for his own case.

The prosecution proceeded despite doubts about its witnesses and opposition to the case among Black residents. District Attorney Ted Pearson, who had served for nearly twenty years and was nearing retirement, faced criticism over the failure to solve the murder of Ronda Morrison. He pursued McMillian’s prosecution despite suspect testimony from Ralph Myers and Bill Hooks and strong doubts in the Black community. At trial, Judge Robert E. Lee Key overrode the jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment and imposed a death sentence. On appeal, Stevenson argued that the evidence was insufficient, that Myers’s account lacked credible corroboration, that the state could not rely solely on an accomplice’s testimony, and that the case involved prosecutorial misconduct, discriminatory jury selection, and an improper change of venue. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals rejected those arguments and affirmed both conviction and sentence.

Unequal Recognition and Vulnerable Defendants

The book also examines how Alabama’s laws and practices affected people whose circumstances made them especially vulnerable to prosecution. After Marsha Colbey delivered a stillborn child, a state pathologist asserted that the baby had been born alive and could have survived with medical attention. Colbey was arrested and charged with capital murder only weeks after the birth. The book situates that prosecution within a child-victim capital-murder category and notes that all five women on Alabama’s death row at the time had been condemned for the unexplained deaths of young children or the deaths of abusive partners.

Other cases exposed how weak claims could become criminal accusations when defendants lacked resources or effective help. Bridget Lee, a mother and church pianist, was charged with capital murder after a stillbirth. Six pathologists who later examined the body unanimously concluded that neonatal pneumonia had caused the child’s death; the prosecutor then dropped the charges. In another case, an intellectually disabled Black woman, Victoria Banks, was coerced into pleading guilty to killing a newborn who had never existed. Her freedom was secured after investigators established that she had undergone a tubal ligation five years before her arrest, making it biologically impossible for her to have conceived or given birth. These cases show how poverty, disability, gender, and race could affect whose account was believed and who received the forensic investigation needed to challenge an accusation.

Statewide Significance

Alabama’s importance in the narrative lies not only in the injustice of particular cases but in the connections among history, political power, evidence, and punishment. The state’s racial history informs the treatment of interracial relationships; its jury practices shape the composition of capital juries; and its lack of a public defender system leaves people facing execution without reliable representation. The book also links the racial terror that followed Reconstruction to the development of the modern death penalty, describing speedy executions in the South as a way to redirect the violence of lynching while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment.

The creation of the Equal Justice Initiative offers a sustained response to that inheritance. Beginning with a small, underfunded office and a need to represent condemned people, its work grew into efforts to challenge death sentences imposed on children and to deepen public understanding of slavery, lynching, and racial injustice. In this account, Alabama is not merely a location where these cases happen. It is a place where the persistence of racial hierarchy can be traced through legal rules and daily institutional decisions, and where sustained legal work seeks to make those connections visible.