Chapter Seven

Justice Denied

Walter’s appeal was denied.
The seventy-page opinion from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his
conviction and death sentence was devastating. I’d filed a lengthy brief that documented the
insufficiency of the evidence and raised every legal deficiency in the trial that I could
identify. I argued that there was no credible corroboration of Myers’s testimony and that
under Alabama law the State couldn’t rely exclusively on the testimony of an accomplice. I
argued that there was prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and an
improper change of venue. I even challenged Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s override of the jury’s
life sentence, though I knew the reduction of an innocent man’s death sentence to life
imprisonment without parole would still have been an egregious miscarriage of justice. The
court rejected all of my arguments.
I didn’t think it would turn out this way. At the oral argument months earlier, I’d been
hopeful as I walked into the imposing Alabama Judicial Building and stood in the grand
appellate courtroom that was formerly a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple. Constructed in
the 1920 s, the building was renovated into a cavernous courthouse in the 1940 s, complete
with marble floors and an impressive domed ceiling. It stood at the end of Dexter Avenue in
Montgomery, across the street from the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away was
the state capitol, adorned with three banners: the American flag, the white and red state flag
of Alabama, and the battle flag of the Confederacy.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on the second floor. The chief
judge of the court was former governor John Patterson. He had made national news in the
1960 s as a fierce opponent of civil rights and racial integration. In 1958 , with the backing of
the Ku Klux Klan, he defeated George Wallace for governor. His positions were even more
pro-segregation than Wallace’s (who, having learned his lesson, would become the most
famous segregationist in America, declaring in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever” just a block away from this courthouse). When he was attorney general
before becoming governor, Patterson banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama and