Based on their personal knowledge of Walter’s whereabouts at the time of the Morrison murder, family members, church members, black pastors, and others all pleaded with Sheriff Tate to release McMillian. Tate wouldn’t do it. The arrest had been too long in the making to admit yet another failure. After some discussion, the district attorney, the sheriff, and the ABI investigator agreed to stick with the McMillian accusation.
Walter’s alibi wasn’t the only problem for law enforcement. Ralph Myers began to have second thoughts about his allegations against McMillian. He was also facing indictment in the Morrison murder. He’d been promised that he wouldn’t get the death penalty and would get favorable treatment in exchange for his testimony, but it was starting to dawn on him that admitting to involvement in a high-profile murder that he actually had nothing to do with was probably not smart.
A few days before the capital murder charges against McMillian were made public, Myers summoned police investigators and told them his allegations against McMillian weren’t true. At this point, Tate and his investigators had little interest in Myers’s recantation. Instead, they decided to pressure Myers to produce more incriminating details. When Myers protested that he didn’t have more incriminating details because, well, the story wasn’t true, the investigators weren’t having it. It’s not clear who decided to put both Myers and McMillian on death row before trial to create additional pressure, but it was a nearly unprecedented maneuver that proved very effective.
It is illegal to subject pretrial detainees like Walter and Myers to confinement that constitutes punishment. Pretrial detainees are generally housed in local jails, where they enjoy more privileges and more latitude than convicted criminals who are sent to prison. Putting someone who has not yet been tried in a prison reserved for convicted felons is almost never done. As is putting someone not yet convicted of a crime on death row. Even the other death row prisoners were shocked. Death row is the most restrictive punitive confinement permitted. Prisoners are locked in a small cell by themselves for twenty-three hours a day. Condemned inmates have limited opportunity for exercise or visitation and are held in disturbingly close proximity to the electric chair.
Sheriff Tate drove Walter to Holman Correctional Facility, a short ride away in Atmore, Alabama. Before the trip, the sheriff again threatened Walter with racial slurs and terrifying plans. It’s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman’s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer. The transfer of Myers and McMillian from the county jail to death row took place on August 1, 1987, less than a month before the scheduled execution of Wayne Ritter.
When Walter McMillian arrived on Alabama’s death row—just ten years after the modern death penalty was reinstituted—an entire community of condemned men awaited him. Most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975 were black, although to Walter’s surprise nearly 40 percent of them were white. Everyone was poor, and everyone asked him why he was there.
Condemned prisoners on Alabama’s death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable. Each death row inmate was placed in a five-by-eight-foot cell with a metal door, a commode, and a steel bunk. The temperatures in August consistently reached over 100 degrees for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Incarcerated men would trap rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes they found inside the prison to pass the time and to keep safe. Isolated and remote, most prisoners got few visits and even fewer privileges.
Existence at Holman centered on Alabama’s electric chair. The large wooden chair was built in the 1930s, and inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes. They called it “Yellow Mama.” The executions at Holman resumed just a few years before Walter arrived. John Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted in Holman’s execution chamber. Russ Canan, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans. Evans filmed what became an after-school special for kids where he shared the story of his life with schoolchildren and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made.
After courts refused to block the Evans execution following multiple appeals, Canan went to the prison to witness the execution at Evans’s request. It was worse than Russ could have ever imagined. He later filed a much-reviewed affidavit describing the entire horrific process:
At 8:30 P.M. the first jolt of 1,900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans’s body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted from the electrode tied to Mr. Evans’s left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of greyish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans’s face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead.
The electrode on the left leg was refastened. At 8:30 P.M. [sic] Mr. Evans was administered a second thirty-second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. Evans. The doctors reported that his heart was still beating, and that he was still alive.
At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request for clemency was denied.
At 8:40 P.M., a third charge of electricity, thirty seconds in duration, was passed through Mr. Evans’s body. At 8:44, the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes.
Walter McMillian knew nothing about any of this before he arrived at Holman. But with another scheduled execution fast approaching, condemned prisoners were talking about the electric chair constantly when Walter arrived. For his first three weeks on Alabama’s death row, the horrific execution of John Evans was pretty much all he heard about.
The surreal whirlwind of the preceding weeks had left Walter devastated. After living his whole life free and unrestrained by anyone or anything, he found himself confined and threatened in a way he could never have imagined. The intense rage of the arresting officers and the racist taunts and threats from uniformed police officers who did not know him were shocking. He saw in the people who arrested him and processed him at the courthouse, even in other inmates at the jail, a contempt that he’d never experienced before. He had always been well liked and gotten along with just about everybody. He genuinely believed the accusations against him had been a serious misunderstanding and that once officials talked to his family to confirm his alibi, he’d be released in a couple of days. When the days turned into weeks, Walter began to sink into deep despair. His family assured him that the police would soon let him go, but nothing happened.
His body reacted to the shock of his situation. A lifelong smoker, Walter tried to smoke to calm his nerves, but at Holman he found the experience of smoking nauseating and quit immediately. For days he couldn’t taste anything he ate. He couldn’t orient or calm himself. When he woke each morning, he would feel normal for a few minutes and then sink into terror upon remembering where he was. Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face. Looking in a mirror, he didn’t recognize himself.