Walter McMillian and Ralph Myers

Walter McMillian and Ralph Myers are connected through testimony that made Myers the prosecution’s central witness against McMillian and through Myers’s later recantation of much of that testimony. Their relationship is presented not as an established personal bond but as a contested evidentiary link: Myers accused McMillian, then withdrew key parts of his account, and the court tasked with reviewing the change declined to find that the original testimony was perjury.

The prosecution’s central witness

After Myers was removed from death row and returned to Monroe County, he reaffirmed his initial accusations against McMillian. With Myers again serving as the prosecution’s primary witness, and Bill Hooks prepared to testify that he had seen McMillian’s truck at the crime scene, the district attorney believed the case could proceed. The trial was scheduled for February 1988. The prosecution’s case thus rested in significant part on Myers’s account, alongside a separate witness’s identification of the truck.

The accusation took shape within a broader setting of racial inequality in Alabama’s courts. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, including prosecutors serving a state with sixteen majority-black counties. In Monroe County, which was 40 percent black, all-white juries remained common in serious felony cases. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made racially discriminatory peremptory strikes more directly challengeable, but it also created pressure on prosecutors to find other ways to exclude black jurors. McMillian, confined on death row before trial, was troubled by what other prisoners told him about the jury he might face. This context bears on the conditions surrounding his prosecution; it does not, by itself, establish why Myers accused him or what Myers knew.

Recantation and competing accounts

At the later post-conviction hearing, Myers took the stand and recanted most, if not all, of the relevant portions of his trial testimony. The court’s order treated the change as a conflict between two sworn accounts: either Myers had lied at trial or he had lied at the hearing. It listed the considerations it had weighed, including his demeanor, his opportunity to know the facts, his explanations for both the original testimony and the recantation, possible pressures before and after each account, and conduct or other evidence that might support either version.

The court also acknowledged an important limit on its assessment: because the original trial had been conducted before a different judge, it could not compare Myers’s demeanor at trial with his demeanor during the recantation. It considered whether trial evidence contradicted details in his account and whether evidence from any source showed that he could not have known what he had testified to. The order nevertheless found no conclusive proof that he had perjured himself at the original trial. It noted that pressure brought to bear on Myers after trial could undermine the recantation, while also finding no evidence in the trial record or recantation testimony placing him somewhere other than the crime scene when the murder occurred.

The denial of relief

The resulting order, dated May 19, 1992, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the theory that Myers had perjured himself at the original trial. It therefore did not accept the recantation as grounds to overturn McMillian’s conviction. The ruling did not resolve the contradiction by establishing which account was true; instead, it treated the available evidence as insufficient to prove the claim of perjury.

The order’s narrowness was itself consequential. It was only two and a half pages long, addressed Myers’s testimony but not the other legal claims or the testimony of more than a dozen other witnesses, and cited no case law. The court’s treatment left Myers’s changing account at the center of the dispute while declining to examine the broader body of evidence presented at the hearing.

What the relationship reveals

Myers’s role changed from accusing McMillian at trial to retracting most of the relevant parts of his account in post-conviction proceedings. Yet the legal consequence of that reversal was limited: the court recognized the recantation and the possibility of pressure, but found no conclusive basis to call the trial testimony perjury. The relationship therefore remained defined by unresolved testimony rather than by a settled account of how the two men were connected to the crime.

That unresolved link also shows how much could turn on one witness in a capital prosecution. Myers’s accusation helped make the case against McMillian proceed; his later recantation raised the possibility that the conviction rested on false testimony; and the court’s denial left that possibility unaccepted as a legal finding. The racial conditions surrounding jury selection sharpen the stakes of the prosecution, but the evidence presented here does not establish that those conditions explain Myers’s testimony. What it does establish is a stark contrast between the importance of his account at trial and the limited scope of the court’s response when he withdrew it.