What Just Mercy Doesn’t Tell You
By: Chris Worden
Tags: Courts, Justice, Justmercy, Racial Justice, Criminal Justice Reform

Your Alibi Won’t Save You

A jury convicted McMillian despite SIX black alibi witnesses testifying they saw him at locations that would have made it impossible for him to commit the murder.

McMillian was convicted despite no physical evidence. No gun (or any indication he owned the type of weapon employed in the murder), no hair, no fingerprints, no bloody clothes, no recovered cash, and no satchel that Meyers said McMillian used to cart away the money and gun.

In 1990, with Stevenson serving as McMillian’s attorney, the Court of Appeals of Alabama affirmed the conviction.

Jaw-droppingly crazy.

Then, in an absolutely insane twist, Stevenson found a cassette of an interview with Meyers that had never been provided to the defense in the original case. When Stevenson flipped the tape, he heard an interview conducted months earlier in which Meyers emphatically denied McMillian’s involvement in the murder.

We learn that after this first interview, the sheriff placed Meyers — who had a horrific fear of fire arising from a childhood incident— on death row in the cell closest to the electric chair shortly before an execution. To secure a change of scenery, Meyers told the sheriff everything he wanted to hear.

Stevenson also found an undisclosed statement from an inmate who heard Meyers say he and another man had committed the murder and intended to blame McMillian and a statement from a witness who saw the victim alive at 10:30 a.m., which contradicted the district attorney’s theory that the murder happened between 10:15–10:45 a.m.

Adonis Creed K.O.’s injustice

During a hearing seeking a new trial, Meyers came clean as forcefully as he did in the original interview audio, and Stevenson also presented evidence that McMillian’s truck wasn’t “dropped to a low-rider” until six months after the murder, so the crucial detail two witnesses used to identify McMillian’s truck was provably false.

Gasp! (No, not really).

Then something happened that probably shocked the American viewing public but not a single lawyer who has practiced criminal law — the judge DENIED the motion for a new trial, concluding it could not say whether Meyers was lying in the recantation or at the original trial.

Ultimately, the Alabama Court of Appeals overturned the guilty verdict and delivered the Hollywood ending we see (to the extent being freed from false imprisonment after seven years only to suffer dementia that has you believing you’re back on death row is satisfying).

Racism or Law Doing What It’s Ordained to Do?

My visceral reaction — which I’m sure was shared by a great many — was “This is some racist bovine feces!” Perhaps. But to truly assess this, you have to understand the well-intended but manipulable procedural hurdles we set up when higher courts review judgments by juries and trial courts (and, as here, when trial courts decide whether to award new trials).

Appellate courts aren’t “do-over” courts. If you get a bad trial result— even a death sentence —nobody automatically looks at all the evidence again as if the case is new. In fact, appellate courts are forbidden from doing so.

Most criminal cases — at both the state and federal level — do not go to trial. In 2018, 80,000 federal cases were filed, 1,600 went to trial, and 320 were acquittals. But even so, because our court system is a pyramid, with a fraction of appeals court judges compared to trial judges, retrying every case in some kind of best-of-three, rock-paper-scissors tourney, would wreck the judicial branch as constituted.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair,” Shakespeare wrote in homage to Alabama Sheriff John Tate

Also, the law gives life to Shakespeare’s Sonnet declaration “the eyes are the window of the soul, and by extension, the soul itself.” We accept that a judge or jury who can hear a voice, see body language, and gaze deeply into eyes can suss out deceit better than somebody who only reads a transcript of what everybody said, which is what appeals courts do. This is supremely logical since most of our communication is non-verbal.

Thus, while each appellate court must absolutely determine whether the prosecutor presented “sufficient evidence beyond a reasonable doubt,” if you conceptualize a defendant’s true innocence as a room full of air, appellate courts are given straws to breathe through.

Maybe justice isn’t blind, but it might have an advanced case of cataracts at the appellate level.

Here are things appellate courts CANNOT do: