Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Small Town Book

On a busy Saturday morning in November 1986, in the small southern town of Monroeville, Alabama, a beautiful white teenager named Ronda Morrison was found brutally murdered in the back room of the dry cleaning store where she worked. Several months later, Walter McMillian, a black man with no criminal record, was arrested and then convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair in a trial that lasted less than three days. His guilt was seen as unquestionable until a young, black, Harvard-educated Yankee lawyer launched his own investigation into the murder. Thanks to Bryan Stevenson's unremitting efforts, six years after Walter McMillian was consigned to a cell on Alabama's death row, he walked out a free man. The state had been forced to acknowledge that investigators had used perjured testimony and withheld evidence from the defense that would have proved him innocent.

The bestselling author of The Hot House once again combines the facts, the real people, and the location itself into this true story, a wide-ranging portrait of the interplay of race, sex, and justice in the American South, made all the more real because it takes place in the same small Alabama town that was the fictional "Maycomb" in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Optioned for film by MGM. Photos.