Circumstantial Evidence

Bryan Stevenson turned his Toyota Corolla onto Interstate 65 and pushed down on the accelerator, merging the well-traveled import into the parade of cars hurrying south from Montgomery. It was mid-January 1989, and Stevenson was en route to Holman prison, where he planned to interview three inmates on death row. He had never met any of them. The last name on his list was Walter "Johnny D." McMillian. Stevenson was not from the Deep South. He had been born and reared in rural Delaware, and he often found life in Alabama depressing. He stayed only because of his work. As a civil rights lawyer who specialized in death row appeals, Stevenson was right where he belonged. More than half of the nation's death row inmates are imprisoned in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Nearly eighty-five percent of all executions take place in those six states. Among attorneys the states are known as the Death Belt. Stevenson was the newly hired director of the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center, and it was his job to do everything he could to prevent Alabama from executing a single inmate. Despite its grand-sounding name, the nonprofit Resource Center was a fledgling two-month-old operation based in a Victorian row house not far from the state capitol in Montgomery. The driving force behind the creation of the Center was a no-nonsense white woman in her late twenties named Eva Ansley, who had waged a one-person campaign against the death penalty in Alabama for several years. Ansley was not an attorney, but she was highly respected in Alabama legal circles and despised by death penalty proponents. In early 1988 Bryan Stevenson heard about Ansley's efforts in Alabama and called to offer his help. Back then he was working for Southern Prisoners' Defense Committee in Atlanta, another nonprofit group opposed to the death penalty. Stevenson agreed to represent Ansley's most hard-pressed clients, and he also began offering other lawyers in Alabama advice on how to file death row appeals. With Stevenson's help, Ansley convinced the Alabama Bar Association that something had to be done to assure the condemned men legal representation up to the point of their execution, and the bar association agreed to help apply for various federal grants. In November 1988 the federal funds started to arrive, the Resource Center was organized, and Stevenson agreed to move to Montgomery temporarily to run it. He and Ansley were now in the process of hiring a staff and unpacking files. As he drove south Stevenson thought about the three men he planned to meet. With more than a hundred cases to choose from, Stevenson's decision to pick out McMillian's might have seemed odd. There were lots of other prisoners much closer to being executed. But Johnny D.'s case had stuck out. Nearly everyone on death row had a long criminal record. Johnny D. didn't. Nearly everyone on death row had been linked to a murder by fingerprints or some other physical evidence. He hadn't. And few death row inmates had alibis as strong as Johnny D.'s. Why hadn't jurors believed his six alibi witnesses? Stevenson thought he already knew the answer. They were black, and that made them less credible than Ernest Welch, a white man. Part of the reason Stevenson assumed this was that he was black. He knew what it was like not to be taken as seriously in an Alabama courtroom as a white attorney. At age twenty-eight he was a handsome man, sEarley, Pete is the author of 'Circumstantial Evidence', published 1995 under ISBN 9780553763560 and ISBN 0553763563.