Justice Revisited

FOR THE RESIDENTS OF MONROEVILLE, ALABAMA, the case of Walter McMillian was life eerily imitating art. McMillian, a black man accused of a murder he didn't commit, watched his drama unfold in the place considered the setting for the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a wrenching tale of racial injustice in the white-picket world of the rural South.

McMillian spent the past six years on Alabama's death row for the 1986 murder of a young white woman and always argued that racial prejudice figured in his fate. Although half a dozen witnesses testified that he'd been home at a fish fry at the time of the killing, the middle-aged father was found guilty after a trial that lasted a mere day and a half. His conviction rested primarily on the testimony of three men, one of whom, a convicted criminal, said he saw McMillian hovering over the victim's body after the shooting. Last week, after repeated, vigorous appeals, prosecutors conceded that the witnesses had lied, and McMillian went free, all charges against him dismissed. Was his faith in the judicial system restored? "No, not at all," he said.