Just Mercy is based on a true story of harrowing bigotry infiltrating, manipulating, and coercing the Alabama judicial system into abandoning its duty to protect and serve black Americans – but how does the Warner Bros. movie compare to the true story? Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose other credits include The Glass Castle and the indie gem Short Term 12, Just Mercy's blockbuster cast includes Michael B. Jordan as civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, Jamie Foxx as the falsely accused Walter McMillian, and Brie Larson as Alabama activist Eva Ansley. The supporting roles are filled by such familiar faces as Tim Blake Nelson, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Rafe Spall, Rob Morgan, and Karan Kendrick.
In the fall of 1986 in Monroeville, Alabama, an 18-year-old girl named Ronda Morrison was found murdered at the dry cleaning store in which she worked, having been shot several times. The brutal butchering shook the small town terribly, as well as its law enforcement officers who, almost a year later, had found no solid evidence as to who the culprit was. Public pressure combined with this lack of discernible evidence is what eventually led Monroeville's police officials into arresting local citizen Walter "Johnny D" McMillian for the murder.
What would come of McMillian's treatment and trial is considered to be among the most important cases of legal injustice since the official end of the civil rights movement in 1968. Here's the true story of what happened, including some details that Just Mercy leaves out.
Walter McMillian's Arrest
The murder of Ronda Morrison sent outrage, fear, and trepidation across the small community of Monroeville, Alabama. After months of searching for answers, police officials were unable to find any leads as to who the culprit was, and whether or not they were going to strike again. With nothing to go and pressure mounting to pin the murder on someone, they began honing in on Walter McMillian, a local black man with no prior criminal history, and a self-employed logger who had done a lot of hired work around the community.
As is revealed in Just Mercy, Walter's biggest crime – one that was well-known across the small town – was his extramarital affair with a married white woman. When she eventually went on to divorce her husband, the case was a very public event, casting McMillian into the limelight. It didn't take long for the town's ill opinion of the wood worker to turn into casting him as a man capable of murder.
And it was with this line of thinking that newly elected Sheriff Tom Tate (portrayed in Just Mercy by Michael Harding) arrested McMillian for Morrison's murder in June 1987. The police also, in an illegal move never before witnessed by attorney Bryan Stevenson, held MacMillain on Death Row for 15 months before his trial even began. According to Pete Earley's book, Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town, upon McMillian's objections to the arrest (citing the fact that he was at a fish fry on the morning of the crime), Tate replied:
"I don't give a damn what you say or what you do. I don't give a damn what your people say either. I'm going to put twelve people on a jury who are going to find your goddamn black ass guilty."
As suggested in the film, the State of Alabama rested the bulk of their case on the testimony of Ralph Meyers (Tim Blake Nelson), a lifelong criminal who had been recently arrested on suspicion of murdering a different woman in a neighboring county. Investigators initially told Meyers that they had suspected him of Morrison's death as well, and after some interrogation, the convicted felon eventually told police that he had witnessed McMillain standing over the 18-year-old's corpse.
Once McMillian finally had his day in court, presiding Judge Robert E. Lee Key, Jr. had the trial moved from a county that was 40 percent black to Baldwin, where 86 percent of the residents were white. On August 17, 1988, a jury of 11 white citizens found McMillian guilty and recommended a life sentence based not only on the testimony of Meyers, but three others as well (these other accounts were not explored in Just Mercy). The jury ignored the testimonies of several alibi witnesses who were with McMillian at the fish fry, and a couple of months later Judge Lee Key, Jr. overruled the recommendation of a life sentence and imposed the death penalty.
Bryan Stevenson's Investigation
As depicted in Just Mercy, Walter McMillain's case was among the first – and the most important – of attorney Bryan Stevenson's career. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1985, nearly a year before Morrison's murder (an inaccuracy in the film's timeline), Stevenson moved first to Atlanta, Georgia and then to Montgomery, where he helped form the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center, and later the Equal Justice Initiative.
Upon meeting McMillian in 1988, Stevenson was convinced of his innocence and began working to exonerate his client. As seen in Just Mercy, the Harvard graduate ventured out to meet McMillian's family and the members of his community, most of whom had been with Walter at the fish fry, and through his work Stevenson not only discovered evidence that proved McMillian's innocence, but also discovered that the State had coerced its witnesses into falsely testifying against him.
Despite this overwhelming evidence, gathered by more lawyers than were depicted in the film (for the sake of storytelling, these deeds were attributed to Larson's character Eva Ansley), it took five appeals to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals before McMillian was given another day in court.
The Case and the Aftermath
As seen in Just Mercy, once McMillain was granted a court case in front of unbiased eyes, the judicial process did not take long. In addition to a 60 Minutes segment bringing national attention to the case, Stevenson unearthed a taped conversation between Meyers and the police in which the convict complained about being forced to implicate McMillian, District Attorney. Thomas Chapman (Spall) filed a motion to dismiss the charges.
Following his exoneration, McMillian spoke before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the dangerous implications of the death penalty. Despite the extreme level of deception and corruption that was unveiled during his trial, the authorities of Monroeville were hardly held accountable. Chapman never admitted that there had been a "deliberate effort to frame" McMillian, and Sheriff Tate was allowed to stay in office until his retirement in 2018. Similarly, when McMillian filed a civil lawsuit against Tate and other state officials, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him, forcing him to settle out of court for an undisclosed amount.
So, while there is a certainly a level of justice in Just Mercy, the reality of Walter McMillian's story is that the people who victimized him were not brought to justice for it. Still, Cretton's film is a moving and effective portrayal of a fight for exoneration within a prejudiced system.
