After a two-day trial in 1988, McMillian was convicted for the 1986 murder of Ronda Morrison during what authorities surmised was a robbery of a dry-cleaning business that went badly awry. Morrison was working in the shop on that fateful Saturday morning. The murder was so shocking that my mother called me in Atlanta, where I lived then, to tell me about it.

After months went by with no arrest, local authorities’ desperation to finger a suspect was matched only by a bias that easily dragooned a black man. McMillian was arrested and shunted off to prison — placed on death row in Alabama’s notorious Holman Correctional Facility even before his trial started — on dubious testimony and no hard evidence.

Monroeville’s poorly-trained law enforcement officers had destroyed the crime scene with their shoddy methods, and they ignored several witnesses who said that McMillian was elsewhere during the murder. Instead, police encouraged testimony from a white offender whose claims were wildly far-fetched. And, in their haste to frame McMillian, prosecutors violated countless legal and ethical standards, including withholding evidence. A white police officer, Woodrow Ikner, was kicked off the police force after he refused to give perjured testimony implicating McMillian.

McMillian told Stevenson that the local sheriff, Tom Tate, used racial epithets and threatened him with lynching when he made the arrest. In his memoir, Stevenson recounts Tate’s threats this way: “ ‘We’re going to keep all you niggers from running around with these white girls. I ought to take you off and hang you like we done that nigger in Mobile.’ ”

As Stevenson notes, Tate was referring to the murder of 19-year-old Michael Donald, who was lynched in Mobile in 1981, as racial resentment ran high among some whites following the acquittal of a black man for the shooting of a white police officer. Donald was not involved in the case; angry members of the Ku Klux Klan randomly grabbed him off the street, beat him, slit his throat and hanged his body from a tree. Donald’s murder marked the last known lynching of a black person in America.

By the time McMillian was released from prison, he had served nearly six years for a crime he did not commit. And Stevenson and his colleagues had endured harassment and bomb threats for daring to represent him. The trial judge had made an extraordinary — and highly unethical — phone call to Stevenson to try to persuade him not to take the case on appeal.

“Bryan, this is Robert E. Lee Key. Why in the hell would you want to represent someone like Walter McMillian? Do you know he’s reputed to be one of the biggest drug dealers in all of South Alabama? I got your notice entering an appearance, but you don’t want anything to do with this case,” Stevenson recounted in his memoir.

McMillian’s only crime seemed to be a violation of local social norms: Before his arrest, he had been romantically involved with a married white woman. When he was released from prison, some of the white townsfolk were not ready to admit that he had been wronged. That included Sheriff Tate, according to Just Mercy.

In 2013, McMillian died a broken man. Tate, by contrast, still serves as sheriff of Monroe County. (Never defeated for re-election, he will retire in December after serving for 30 years.) And no one in power — not the sheriff or the district attorney or the Alabama State Legislature — has ever apologized for the wrongful conviction. The legacy of the gross injustice perpetrated against McMillian, like the lynchings of the distant past, lives on, unacknowledged by the broader community.