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, just maybe, we could persuade local officials to retreat from the case against Walter. I made a motion to reconsider the denial of a new trial for Mr. McMillian. I immediately got an affidavit from Darnell stating that Hooks’s testimony was a lie. I took the risk of talking to a few local lawyers about whether the new prosecutor might acknowledge that the conviction was unreliable and support a new trial if there was compelling new evidence.
Several people had suggested that Tom Chapman, the new Monroe County district attorney and a former criminal defense attorney, would be fairer and more sympathetic to someone wrongly convicted than lifelong prosecutor Ted Pearson. After Pearson’s long tenure as D.A., Chapman’s election represented something of a new era. He was in his forties and had talked about modernizing law enforcement in the region. Some said that he was ambitious and might want to run for statewide office someday. I also discovered that he had represented Karen Kelly in a prior proceeding, which told me that he was already familiar with the case. I was hopeful.
I was still sorting out how to proceed when Darnell called me at my office.
“Mr. Stevenson, you have to help. They arrested me this morning and took me to the jail. I just got out on bond.”
“What?”
“I asked them what I had done. They told me I was being charged with perjury.” He sounded terrified.
“Perjury? Based on what you told Mr. McMillian’s lawyers a year ago? Have they come to interview you or talk to you since we got your statement? You were supposed to let me know if you heard from them.”
“No, sir. I haven’t heard from any of them. They just came and arrested me and told me I had been indicted for perjury.”
I hung up with Darnell, shocked and furious. It was unheard of to indict someone for perjury without any investigation or compelling evidence to establish that a false statement had been made. Police and prosecuters had found out that Darnell was talking to us and they decided to punish him for it.
A few days later, I called the new D.A. to set up a meeting.
On my way to his office, I decided to give him a chance to explain what was going on, instead of angrily