Walt Harrington

Walt Harrington was a Washington Post journalist whose reporting visit to Alabama helped connect the case of Walter McMillian with journalist Pete Earley. Harrington’s role in the account is brief but consequential: he carried what he had heard about the case from one journalist to another, prompting a new investigation into McMillian’s conviction.

Identity and Introduction

A year before Pete Earley contacted Bryan Stevenson, Harrington had come to Alabama to write about Stevenson’s work. During that visit, he heard Stevenson describe McMillian’s case. The account identifies Harrington as a journalist and as a friend of Earley; it gives no further biographical details.

Role in the McMillian Case

Harrington passed the information about McMillian to Earley. Earley then contacted Stevenson, read the transcripts and case files provided to him, and spent time with several people involved. He came to share the team’s astonishment that McMillian had been convicted on such unreliable evidence. Harrington is thus the link in this chain of reporting: his visit did not itself resolve the case, but it carried Stevenson’s account beyond Alabama and brought an outside journalist into closer examination of the evidence.