Walter Mcmillian Guilty

Stevenson’s principal focus as an attorney is death penalty cases. He aims to get falsely accused inmates off of death row. The case at hand is that of Walter McMillian, a male that was charged for the murder of a woman named Ronda Morrison. As the case unfolds, it is evident that the evidence presented did not help to validate Walter McMillian as guilty. Due to the local police being pressured to convict a murder for the victim, they were hasty in their investigation of the evidence and quickly pinned it on a practical target. There is also an underlying racial aspect of McMillian’s conviction since he is a black male and had been with interracial, adulterous relationship with a married white woman and that had made people suspicious of him.

The sheriff paid off Bill Hooks, a key ‘witness’ to the murder, in order for the case to be solved. “[Ralph] told us about being pressured by the sheriff and the ABI and threatened with the death penalty if he didn’t testify against McMillian” (Stevenson, 136). The public had soon calmed down after the supposed killer was found. Sadly, the public didn’t question McMillian because of their trust in their justice system – which they are not at fault for – but also because McMillian looked the part. Had he been a middle-to-high class white male, he definitely wouldn’t have been put on death row, let alone convicted at all. The insinuation is not that McMillian’s peers were all racist but as a society, we tend to criminalize darker skin. “When the judge saw me sitting at the defense table, he said to me harshly, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be here without counsel. Go back outside and wait in the hallway until your lawyer arrives’” (Stevenson, 300). The judge had assumed that Stevenson was the criminal because of the color of his skin. Because he had been with his white client, the judge had thought that the client had been the