officers. McMillian was the leader of the operation.” From its focus on his pretrial placement on death row to the extra security surrounding his court appearances, the narrative in the press was clear: This man was extremely dangerous.
At this point, people seemed uninterested in the truth surrounding the crime. During the most recent hearing in Baldwin County, the State’s local supporters walked out of the courtroom rather than hear the evidence that supported Walter’s innocence. It was risky, but we hoped that national press coverage of our side of the story would change the narrative.
A Washington Post journalist, Walt Harrington, had come to Alabama to do a piece on our work a year earlier and had heard me describe the McMillian case. He passed that information to a journalist friend of his, Pete Earley, who contacted me and became immediately interested. After reading the transcripts and files we provided him, he jumped into the case, spent time with several of the players, and quickly came to share our astonishment that Walter had been convicted on such unreliable evidence.
I’d given a speech at Yale Law School earlier in the year that was attended by a producer from the popular CBS investigative program 60 Minutes, and he also called me. We’d gotten calls from various news magazine programs over the previous few years that expressed interest in covering our work, but I was wary. My general attitude was that press coverage rarely helped our clients. Beyond the general anti-media sentiments in the South, the death penalty was particularly polarizing. It’s such a politically charged topic that even sympathetic pieces about people on death row usually triggered a local backlash that created more problems for the client and the case. Even though the clients sometimes wanted press attention, I was extremely resistant to media interviews about pending cases. I knew of too many cases where a favorable profile in the media had provoked an expedited execution date or retaliatory mistreatment that made things much worse.
We filed our appeal in the Court of Criminal Appeals that summer. With no small amount of lingering uncertainty, I decided to move forward with the 60 Minutes piece. Veteran reporter Ed Bradley and his producer David Gelber came down from New York City to Monroeville on a 100-degree day in July and interviewed many of the people whose testimony we’d presented at our hearing. They spoke with Walter, Ralph Myers, Karen Kelly, Darnell Houston, Clay Kast, Jimmy Williams, Walter’s family, and Woodrow Ikner. They confronted Bill Hooks at his job and conducted an extensive interview with Tommy Chapman. Word got around quickly that news celebrity Ed Bradley was in town, upsetting local officials. The Monroe Journal wrote:
Too many of these [out-of-town] writers express open scorn for the people and institutions they encounter here, making no more than a superficial effort to gather facts. Worse, a few have been demonstrably inaccurate. We could do without any more news coverage of the “big-time reporter comes to hick town” genre.
Even before the piece was broadcast, the local media seemed to be urging the community to distrust anything they heard reported about the case. In “CBS Examines Murder Case,” a local reporter for the Monroe Journal wrote, “Monroe County District Attorney Tommy Chapman said he believes researchers for the CBS television newsmagazine program 60 Minutes had their minds made up before ever coming here.” Chapman had taken to using a photo of Walter obtained at the time of his arrest that showed him with long bushy hair and a beard, which Chapman thought made it clear that he was a dangerous criminal. “The person they interviewed at Holman prison is not the same person arrested by Sheriff Tate for this murder,” Chapman explained. The Journal added that Chapman offered CBS the photograph of the “real” McMillian taken at the time of his arrest, but they were “not interested.” Prisoners in Alabama are required to remain clean-shaven, so of course Walter looked different when interviewed on camera.
When the 60 Minutes piece aired months later, local officials were quick to discredit it. The Mobile Press Register headline was “DA: TV Account of McMillian’s Conviction a ‘Disgrace’ ”; the article quoted Chapman: “For them to hold themselves up as a reputable news show is beyond belief, and irresponsible.” The publicity was characterized as further injuring Ronda Morrison’s parents. The local writers complained that the Morrisons had to worry and deal with the stress that new publicity “could lead many people to think McMillian is innocent.”