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down, he got right to business.
“Mr. Stevenson,” he began. “I can prove that Walter McMillian is innocent.”
“Really?”
“Bill Hooks is lying. I didn’t know he was even involved in that case until they told me he
was part of how they put Walter McMillian on death row. First, I didn’t believe Bill could
have been part of this, but then I found out that he testified that he drove by that cleaners on
the day that girl was killed, and that’s a lie.”
“How do you know?”
“We were working together all that day. We both worked at the NAPA auto parts store last
November. I remember that Saturday when that girl was killed because ambulances and
police started racing up the street. It went on for like thirty minutes. I’d been working in town
for a couple of years and had never seen anything like it.”
“You were working on the Saturday morning that Ronda Morrison was killed?”
“Yes, sir, with Bill Hooks from about eight in the morning till we closed after lunch, after
all them ambulances went by our shop. It was probably close to eleven when the sirens
started. Bill was working on a car in the shop with me. There ain’t but one way out the store;
he never left the entire morning. If he said he drove by the cleaners when that girl was killed,
he’s lying.”
One of the most frustrating things about reading Walter’s trial record had been that the
State’s witnesses—Ralph Myers, Bill Hooks, and Joe Hightower—were so obviously not
believable. Their testimony was laughably inconsistent and completely lacking in credibility.
Myers’s account of his role in the crime—Walter kidnapping him to drive him to the crime
scene and then dropping him off afterward—never made any sense. Hooks, a critical witness
against McMillian, wasn’t persuasive or reliable in the transcript—he just repeated the same
story he’d given the police about driving by the cleaners at the time of the crime. His
response to every line of questioning was to repeat over and over again that he saw Walter
McMillian walk out of the store with a bag, get into his “low-rider” truck, and get driven
away by a white man. He could not answer any of Chestnut’s questions about what else he
saw that day or what he was doing in the area. He just kept repeating that he saw McMillian
at the cleaners. But the state needed Hooks’s testimony.
My plan had been to immediately appeal Walter’s conviction to the Alabama Court of
Criminal Appeals. The State had done so little to prove Walter’s guilt that there weren’t a lot
of legal issues to appeal, but the evidence against him was so unpersuasive that I was hopeful
the court might overturn the conviction simply because it was so unreliable. Once the case
was on direct appeal, no new evidence would be considered. The time for filing a motion for
a new trial in the trial court—the last chance to introduce new facts before an appeal begins
—had already expired. Chestnut and Boynton, Walter’s lawyers for the initial trial, had filed a
motion before withdrawing, and Judge Key had quickly denied it. Darnell said he told
Walter’s former lawyers what he told me and they had raised it in the motion for a new trial,
but no one took it seriously.
In capital cases, a motion for a new trial is routinely filed but rarely granted. But if the
defendant alleges new evidence that could lead to a different outcome in the case—or that
undermines the reliability of the trial—there is typically a hearing. After speaking with
Darnell, I thought about refiling his assertions before the case went up on appeal and maybe,