in. Everyone rose, as is the custom. When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone
else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long pause as we all waited
for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s
when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very
quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned
her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” People chuckled nervously as she took her seat, but
when she looked at me, I saw tears in her eyes.
In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition. I smiled now,
because I knew she was saying to the room, “I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but
I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m
here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.”
I smiled at Mrs. Williams while she sat proudly. For the first time since I started working on
the case, everything we were struggling to achieve finally seemed to make sense. It took me a
minute to realize that the judge was calling my name, impatiently asking me to begin.
The last day of hearings went well. There were a half-dozen people who had been jailed or
imprisoned with Ralph Myers whom Ralph had told he was being pressured to give false
testimony against Walter McMillian. We found most of them and had them testify. They were
consistent in what they related. Isaac Dailey, who had been falsely accused by Myers of
committing the Pittman murder, explained how Myers had falsely implicated Walter in the
Pittman crime. Myers had confided to Dailey after he was arrested that he and Karen had
discussed pinning the Pittman murder on Walter. “He related to us that he and Karen did the
killing and, ah, plotted together to put it off on Johnny D.”
Another inmate who wrote letters for Myers at the Monroe County Jail explained that
Myers didn’t know McMillian, had no knowledge of the Morrison murder, and was being
pressured by police to testify falsely against McMillian.
We saved the most powerful evidence for the end. The tapes that Tate, Benson, and Ikner
had made when they interrogated Myers were pretty dramatic. The multiple recorded
statements Myers gave to the police featured Myers repeatedly telling the police that he
didn’t know anything about the Morrison murder or Walter McMillian. They included the
officers’ threats against Myers and Myers’s resistance to framing an innocent man for murder.
Not only did the tapes confirm Myers’s recantation and contradict his trial testimony, they
exposed the lie that Pearson had told the court, the jury, and McMillian’s trial counsel—that
there were only two statements provided by Myers. In fact, Myers gave at least six additional
statements to the police that were largely consistent with his testimony at the Rule 32 hearing
that he had no information about Walter McMillian committing the Ronda Morrison murder.
All of these recorded statements were typed, exculpatory, and favorable to Walter McMillian,
and none of them had been disclosed to McMillian’s attorneys, as was required.
I called on McMillian’s trial lawyers, Bruce Boynton and J. L. Chestnut, to testify about how
much more they could have done to win an acquittal if the State had turned over the
evidence it had suppressed. We finished the presentation of our evidence and, to our surprise,
the State put on no rebuttal case. I didn’t know what they could have presented to rebut our
evidence, but I’d assumed they would present something. The judge seemed surprised, too. He
paused and then said he wanted the parties to submit written briefs arguing what ruling he