Ted Pearson

Ted Pearson was Monroe County’s district attorney for nearly twenty years and made the prosecution of Walter McMillian a major case near the end of his career. He pressed ahead despite suspect testimony and community doubts, and later evidence revealed that he had asked a police officer to give false testimony and had misrepresented how many statements Ralph Myers gave investigators. His role places the McMillian case within a larger account of Southern prosecutorial power, racialized jury selection, and the consequences of concealing evidence.

Career and Political Setting

Pearson and his family had lived in South Alabama for generations. He knew the region’s customs, values, and traditions and had put that familiarity to work in the courtroom. By the time of McMillian’s prosecution, Pearson was getting older and planned to retire. He also resented criticism of his office for failing to solve Ronda Morrison’s murder more quickly, and the book presents him as determined to leave office with a victory. He likely regarded the prosecution as one of the most important cases of his career.

His tenure unfolded within a justice system whose formal rules did not erase racial disparities in political and legal power. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. As African Americans exercised their voting rights during the 1970s, some prosecutors and judges worried about the effects of changing county demographics on reelection. Legislative arrangements also maintained white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. Pearson was more obliged than earlier in his career to attend to Black residents’ concerns, but that attention did not produce substantive changes during his tenure.

The racial history surrounding the case extended beyond elections. Laws criminalizing interracial sex and marriage had helped enforce racial hierarchy after Reconstruction, and Southern law enforcement had long treated the policing of Black men’s relationships with white women as part of its role. McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly existed within that history. The evidence does not establish Pearson’s personal motive in pursuing the case, but it situates the prosecution in a society where interracial intimacy carried an enduring political and legal charge.

The Case Against McMillian

When Pearson first heard the investigators’ evidence, Myers’s account struck him as far-fetched: Myers’s dramatic embellishments made even the basic allegations needlessly complicated. Yet Pearson proceeded against McMillian with Myers as a central witness and Bill Hooks also prepared to testify that he had seen McMillian’s truck at the crime scene. Black residents had told Pearson they believed McMillian was innocent, and the testimony itself was suspect, but Pearson remained confident he could obtain a guilty verdict.

That confidence mattered because McMillian faced a system in which the racial composition of the jury could be shaped through discretionary strikes. Although earlier Supreme Court rulings had prohibited racial exclusion, prosecutors continued to strike Black prospective jurors, and the practical barriers remained formidable. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made it possible to challenge such strikes more directly. Pearson knew that experienced civil rights lawyers Bruce Boynton and J. L. Chestnut would object to discriminatory jury selection. He was less concerned that Judge Robert E. Lee Key would take their objections seriously, but the new ruling still posed a difficulty for a prosecution in a county that was 40 percent Black.

Venue and the Trial’s Racial Geography

The Morrison murder had received extraordinary pretrial attention. In October 1987, when the court heard pretrial motions, Boynton and Chestnut asked to move the trial, despite expecting little from a motion that Alabama courts rarely granted. Pearson agreed that the publicity justified a change of venue. The apparent concession did not resolve the attorneys’ concern: Chestnut suspected that the judge and prosecutor had already arranged what would happen next.

Judge Key granted the defense motion and suggested moving the trial to a neighboring county so witnesses would not have far to travel. Most neighboring counties had substantially larger Black populations than Baldwin County, which was only 9 percent Black. The hearing thus turned on more than publicity or convenience: the location of the trial also shaped the racial composition of the community from which a jury could be drawn. Pearson’s agreement to change venue came amid his concern about Batson, but the available account does not establish that the agreement itself was a scheme to secure an all-white jury.

Evidence of Misconduct and Aftermath

At the later evidentiary hearing, Monroeville police officer Woodrow Ikner testified that Pearson had asked him to say Morrison’s body was dragged from the front counter to where it was found. Ikner knew that account would be false and refused. He was soon discharged from the police department. His testimony connected the prosecution’s effort to shape the physical evidence to a concrete consequence for a witness who would not provide the requested account.

The hearing also exposed the handling of Myers’s statements. Recordings made during interrogations showed Myers repeatedly saying that he knew nothing about Morrison’s murder or McMillian, while also documenting threats by officers and Myers’s resistance to framing an innocent man. The recordings contradicted Myers’s trial testimony and his later recantation was not the only evidence favorable to McMillian: he had given at least six additional statements, largely consistent with his hearing account, beyond the two Pearson had told the court, jury, and defense counsel existed. The statements were typed, exculpatory, and undisclosed to McMillian’s lawyers, despite the state’s duty to provide favorable evidence.

After Pearson’s long tenure, Tom Chapman, a former criminal defense attorney, became the new district attorney. The change prompted hope that the office might respond more fairly to evidence of wrongful conviction, though the transition did not erase what the hearing revealed about the earlier prosecution. Pearson’s part in the case is defined by this contrast: he pursued a conviction while doubting the quality of key testimony, and later testimony and recordings showed that evidence capable of undermining the case had been distorted or withheld.