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- <text id=93TT1189>
- <title>
- Mar. 15, 1993: Justice Revisited
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Mar. 15, 1993 In the Name of God
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 16
- NATION
- Justice Revisited
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>An innocent man is finally freed from Alabama's death row
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-