to his bailiff, who left the room. I followed the bailiff and saw him whisper something to the deputy outside the courtroom. McMillian’s supporters would be let into the courtroom—now that half the courtroom was already filled.
I walked over to where two ministers had assembled all of Walter’s supporters and tried to explain the situation.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” I said. “They’ve done something really inappropriate today. They’ll let you in now, but the courtroom is already half filled with people here to support the State. There won’t be enough seats for everyone.”
One of the ministers, a heavyset African American man dressed in a dark suit with a large cross around his neck, walked over to me. “Mr. Stevenson, it’s okay. Please don’t worry about us. We’ll have a few people be our representatives today and we will be here even earlier tomorrow. We won’t let nobody turn us around, sir.”
The ministers began selecting people to be representatives in the courtroom. They told Minnie, Armelia, Walter’s children, and several others to go on in. When the ministers called out Mrs. Williams, everyone seemed to smile. Mrs. Williams, an older black woman, stood up and prepared herself to enter the courtroom. She took great care in fixing her hair just right. On top of her gray hair she wore a small hat whose placement she precisely adjusted. She then pulled out a long blue scarf that she delicately wrapped around her neck. Only then did she slowly begin to make her way to the courtroom door where the line of McMillian supporters had formed. I found her dignified ritual riveting, but when the spell was broken I realized that I needed to get going myself. I hadn’t spent the morning preparing for witnesses as I had intended but had instead been drawn into this foolish mistreatment of McMillian’s supporters. I walked past the line of patient people and went inside to begin preparing for the hearing.
I was standing at counsel’s table when out of the corner of my eye I saw that Mrs. Williams had made it to the courtroom door. She was quite elegant in her hat and scarf. She wasn’t a large woman, but there was something commanding about her presence—I couldn’t help but watch her as she moved carefully through the doorway toward the metal detector. She walked more slowly than everyone else, but she held her head high with an undeniable grace and dignity. She reminded me of older women I’d been around all my life—women whose lives were hard but who remained kind and dedicated themselves to building and sustaining their communities. Mrs. Williams glanced at the available rows to see where she would sit, and then turned to walk through the metal detector—and that’s when she saw the dog.
I watched all her composure fall away, replaced by a look of absolute fear. Her shoulders dropped, her body sagged, and she seemed paralyzed. For over a minute she stood there, frozen, and then her body began to tremble and then shake noticeably. I heard her groan. Tears were running down her face and she began to shake her head sadly. I kept watching until she turned around and quickly walked out of the courtroom.
I felt my own mood shift. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Mrs. Williams, but I knew that here in Alabama, police dogs and black folks looking for justice had never mixed well.
I was trying to shake off the dark feeling that the morning’s events had conjured when the officers brought Walter into the courtroom. Because there was no jury, the judge had not permitted me to give him street clothes to wear, so Walter was wearing his prison uniform. They allowed him to be in the courtroom without handcuffs but had insisted on keeping his ankles shackled. Michael and I conferred briefly about the order of witnesses as the rest of McMillian’s family and supporters slowly filed through the metal detector, past the dog, and into the courtroom.
Despite the State’s early-morning maneuvers and the bad omen of the dog and Mrs. Williams, we had another good day in court. Evidence from the state mental health workers who had dealt with Myers after he initially refused to testify in the first trial and was sent to the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility for evaluation confirmed Myers’s testimony from the day before. Dr. Omar Mohabbat explained that Myers had told him then “that the police had framed him to accept the penalty for the