Walter McMillian's state post-conviction hearing and denial of relief was a decisive setback in the effort to overturn his conviction for Ronda Morrison’s murder. Ralph Myers recanted much of the testimony that had implicated McMillian, and the defense presented testimony from more than a dozen other witnesses. Yet on May 19, 1992, Judge Thomas B. Norton Jr. rejected the claim that Myers had perjured himself at trial. The order left McMillian’s conviction standing and made clear that the path to relief would continue in the appellate courts.

Background and Stakes

The hearing took place against a history in which race shaped who was trusted, who served on juries, and whose account of a crime could prevail. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-black counties. Legislators had arranged judicial circuits to preserve white majorities even where a county itself had a Black majority. In Monroe County, which was 40 percent Black, prosecutors in serious felony cases had often excluded Black people from juries. The Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky offered a more direct way to challenge racially discriminatory peremptory strikes, but also gave prosecutors an incentive to find more creative methods of exclusion. McMillian, a Black defendant facing the death penalty, had heard the concerns of other prisoners about the jury he might face and worried about the racial character of the process.

The hearing’s immediate question was narrower: whether there was evidence that Myers had lied in his original trial testimony. The case had already been shaped by his accusations against McMillian, and his recantation put those accusations in direct dispute. The defense’s task was not simply to show that Myers had changed his story, but to persuade the court that the original testimony was perjury. That distinction would govern the ruling.

The Courtroom and the Hearing

The courtroom itself reflected the unequal contest surrounding the case. When Bryan Stevenson entered, a large metal detector stood just inside the door, with an enormous German shepherd held by a police officer on the other side. The room was already half full. The benches that had held McMillian’s supporters the previous day were now mostly occupied by older white people supporting the Morrisons and the prosecution. McMillian’s family and supporters had been told they could not enter, although supporters of the State had been admitted.

Stevenson challenged the exclusion directly, confronting Tom Chapman at the prosecutor’s table before taking the matter to Norton. The visual contrast mattered: the hearing was meant to test the reliability of the conviction, but access to the courtroom had itself been distributed unevenly. It was not a substitute for the evidence about Myers, yet it placed the proceeding within the same local structure of racial power that had shaped jury selection and the prosecution of McMillian.

At the hearing, Myers took the stand and recanted most, if not all, of the relevant portions of his trial testimony. Norton’s later order acknowledged the basic dilemma: Myers had sworn to tell the truth at trial and then changed his account in court. The judge framed the choice as whether Myers had perjured himself at the original trial or during the recantation. That formulation recognized the contradiction but left the court to decide which version to believe.

Norton’s Ruling

A few days after the hearing, a clerk from Baldwin County called Stevenson for a fax number so the judge’s ruling could be sent. Only three sheets came through. The order itself was tersely written and only two and a half pages long. It addressed Myers’s testimony but did not discuss the defense’s other legal claims or the testimony of the other dozen-plus witnesses; it cited no case law.

Norton considered Myers’s demeanor, his opportunity to know the facts he had described at trial, his explanations for both the original testimony and the recantation, outside pressure, and evidence that might support either account. Because the original trial had been conducted by the retired Judge R. E. L. Key, Norton could not compare Myers’s demeanor at that trial with his demeanor during the recantation. Norton also found ample evidence that pressure had been brought to bear on Myers after the trial, which he said could undermine the recantation.

The order concluded that the evidence did not conclusively establish that Myers had perjured himself at trial. It also stated that nothing in the trial record or the recantation testimony placed Myers somewhere other than the crime scene when the murder occurred. Norton therefore found that Myers’s trial testimony had not been shown to be perjured and denied McMillian relief. The conclusion was consequential precisely because it did not resolve the broader body of evidence presented at the hearing: the order treated the recantation claim as insufficient while leaving the defense’s other arguments and witnesses without discussion.

Aftermath and Significance

The ruling was disappointing but not unexpected to Stevenson, who had warned McMillian and his family that meaningful relief might have to come from an appellate court. The mismatch between the hearing and the order nevertheless made the denial especially difficult to understand. Chapman had suggested that Myers had been pressured into recanting, but the prosecution presented no actual evidence to support that claim. Norton’s reliance on possible pressure thus carried substantial weight even though the State had not substantiated the suggestion in court.

Stevenson remained hopeful that the evidence could persuade the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. His team had already begun arguing cases there and had won reversals in capital cases: four in 1990, four in 1991, and another eight by the end of 1992. Those results did not erase Norton’s ruling, but they supplied a practical route forward. When the appellate court did not grant relief, the defense could continue to seek review in the Alabama Supreme Court and the federal courts.

The episode’s central reversal was that a witness’s recantation, supported by a wider hearing record, did not itself dislodge the conviction. Instead, the court narrowed its written answer to whether the original testimony had been proved perjured. That narrow finding prolonged McMillian’s struggle and showed why the defense’s work could not end with presenting evidence: it also had to challenge the legal and institutional terms by which that evidence was judged.