Chapter Nine

I’m Here

Finally, the date for Walter McMillian’s hearing had arrived. We would now have an
opportunity to present Ralph Myers’s new testimony and all the exculpatory evidence we’d
discovered in police records that had never been disclosed.
Michael and I had gone over the case a dozen times, thinking through the best way to
present the evidence of Walter’s innocence. Our biggest concern was Myers, mostly because
we knew he would feel incredible pressure once he was brought back to the county
courthouse, and he’d broken under pressure before. We were consoled by the fact that so
much of our evidence was documentary and could be admitted without the complications and
unpredictability that Myers’s testimony might introduce.
We now had a paralegal on staff, so we brought her into the case. Brenda Lewis was a
former Montgomery police officer who joined us after seeing more abuses of power than she
could tolerate at the police department. An African American woman, she was adept even in
environments where her gender or race made her an outsider. We had asked her to touch
base with our witnesses before the hearing to go over last-minute details and calm their
nerves.
Chapman had called in the state attorney general’s office to help defend Walter’s
conviction, and they’d sent Assistant Attorney General Don Valeska, a longtime prosecutor
with a reputation for being intense and combative. Valeska was a white man in his forties
whose fit, medium frame suggested someone who stayed active; the glasses he wore added to
his serious demeanor. His brother Doug was the district attorney in Houston County, and both
men were aggressive and unapologetic in their prosecution of “bad guys.” Michael and I had
reached out to Chapman once more before the hearing to see if we could persuade him to
reopen the investigation and independently reexamine whether McMillian was guilty. But by
now, Chapman and all of the law enforcement officers had grown tired of us. They seemed
increasingly hostile whenever they had to deal with us. I had considered reporting to them
the bomb threats and death threats we’d received, since they were likely coming from people
in Monroe County, but I wasn’t sure anyone in the sheriff’s or D.A.’s office would care.
The new judge on the case, Judge Thomas B. Norton Jr., had also grown weary of us. We’d