Ralph Myers is the man whose false testimony sent Walter McMillian to Alabama’s death row in 1988 and whose later recantation helped free him, and he appears in Bryan Stevenson’s book and the 2019 film Just Mercy as the coerced state witness at the center of the case. Myers testified that he drove McMillian to Jackson Cleaners in Monroeville and saw him kneeling over eighteen-year-old Ronda Morrison’s body. He later swore under oath that none of it was true.
Who Ralph Myers Was
Ralph Bernard Myers had a long criminal record and was illiterate, unable to read the labels on a prison vending machine. A childhood fire had badly burned his face, leaving visible scars and a way of speaking out of one side of his mouth.1Pete Earley. I Watched the Real Just Mercy Story Unfold
In June 1987, Myers was arrested for the unrelated murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman in Escambia County, Alabama. Investigators from Monroe County, still working the six-month-old Morrison case, questioned him about that killing and pressed him to implicate Walter McMillian. On December 11, 1987, both McMillian and Myers were indicted for Morrison’s capital murder.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
How Investigators Pressured Him Into Testifying
The pending Pittman charge was the first lever. Investigators promised Myers a lighter sentence in that case if he provided testimony against McMillian in the Morrison case.3Pete Earley. For the Murder Victims in Just Mercy, Justice Remains Denied
The second was where the state chose to hold him. Before trial, Myers and McMillian were both placed on death row, a step the Equal Justice Initiative later described as illegal and as a rare form of coercion used to force compliance from defendants and witnesses.4Just Mercy / EJI. Just Mercy Isolated from his family, Myers went through repeated interrogations in which Sheriff Tom Tate and investigators Larry Ikner and Simon Benson fed him details of the crime and signaled through leading questions what they wanted him to say.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
Three months before the August 1988 trial, Myers was sent to the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility for a psychiatric evaluation. He told four staff doctors there that police were pressuring him daily to give a false statement about the Morrison murder and that he knew nothing about it. A report by Dr. Norman Poythress dated May 10, 1988, documented that Myers viewed his earlier confessions as “bogus” and coerced through physical and psychological isolation. The facility did not declare him unfit to testify, and the state did not turn the Taylor Hardin records over to McMillian’s defense before trial.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
Once Myers agreed to cooperate, he was taken off death row and allowed to plead guilty to a lesser, non-capital charge of third-degree robbery, receiving a thirty-year sentence as a habitual offender.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
What He Told the Jury
McMillian’s trial lasted about a day and a half, and Myers was the state’s primary witness.5Equal Justice Initiative. Walter McMillian He testified that on November 1, 1986, he drove McMillian to Jackson Cleaners in McMillian’s green Chevrolet truck. According to Myers, he waited outside, heard popping noises, walked in, and saw McMillian kneeling near Morrison’s body with money in his hands.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
McMillian’s alibi witnesses, who were Black, testified he had been at a church fish fry eleven miles from the scene at the time of the killing. The nearly all-white jury convicted him of capital murder and recommended life without parole. Trial Judge Robert E. Lee Key Jr. overrode that recommendation and imposed the death penalty.5Equal Justice Initiative. Walter McMillian6New York Times. Alabama Releases Man Held on Death Row for Six Years
How and Why Myers Recanted
Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard Law graduate who had recently founded the Equal Justice Initiative, took McMillian’s case in 1988.4Just Mercy / EJI. Just Mercy While the appeal was pending, Myers reached out to the defense and admitted his trial testimony was fabricated. He said he knew nothing about the Morrison murder, was not present when it happened, and had been coerced by Sheriff Tate, Ikner, and Benson, who pressured him and supplied the details he recited on the stand.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
Stevenson put Myers on the stand at an evidentiary hearing. Under oath, Myers called his original testimony a “lie” that had been forced on him by the sheriff of Monroeville.7Ohio State Bar Association. Just Mercy: A Deeper Look at the American Justice System He described being “up under a lot of pressure” and said “the next thing I knew, it had got so bad till I went ahead and started saying anything they wanted to hear.”2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
Other evidence backed him up. The suppressed Taylor Hardin records showed Myers had told doctors months before the trial that he was being coerced. A former inmate named Joe Little testified that Myers had told him before trial he intended to lie on the stand. Additional testimony contradicted the state’s timeline and the physical details of McMillian’s truck.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933
What the Recantation Produced
On January 11, 1993, the trial court ruled there was “insufficient evidence” to prove Myers had committed perjury and denied McMillian post-conviction relief.2Justia. McMillian v. State, 616 So. 2d 933 Stevenson appealed, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction, finding that the state had violated Brady v. Maryland by suppressing exculpatory evidence, including statements from Myers that contradicted his trial testimony.8Cornell Law Institute. McMillian v. Monroe County, 520 U.S. 781 Prosecutors conceded the case had been mishandled. On March 2, 1993, all charges against McMillian were dismissed, and he was released after six years on death row.9Equal Justice Initiative. Alabama Exonerated
No law enforcement official or prosecutor faced criminal charges or meaningful discipline for building the case against McMillian. District Attorney Ted Pearson, who tried it, later defended his conduct, saying he believed McMillian was guilty and did what he was “supposed to do.”10Deseret News. Death’s Door
What Happened to Myers
Myers served roughly thirty years in prison stemming from his plea in the Morrison case. He was released in 2017 and lived in Evergreen, Alabama, until his death on December 11, 2021, at age sixty-five. He was buried at Magnolia Cemetery after services on December 17.11Cope-Keahey Funeral Home. Obituary of Ralph B. Myers Sr.
The Pittman killing, the case that gave investigators their initial leverage over Myers, has never produced a lawful conviction. Neither has the Morrison murder itself.3Pete Earley. For the Murder Victims in Just Mercy, Justice Remains Denied
How the Book and Film Portray Him
Stevenson’s 2014 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption put Myers’s coerced testimony at the center of the McMillian narrative. Stevenson described how Sheriff Tate used bribery and intimidation to secure Myers’s cooperation and how the state mental hospital failed to intervene despite clear evidence Myers was being pressured to lie. The book frames Myers less as a villain than as a compromised person weaponized against an innocent man by officials focused on closing a case.12LitCharts. Just Mercy, Chapter 3: Trials and Tribulations
In the 2019 film adaptation, Tim Blake Nelson played Myers. Author Pete Earley, who covered the case in his 1995 book Circumstantial Evidence, called Nelson’s performance “dead on,” saying the actor accurately captured the physical effects of Myers’s childhood burns and his distinctive speech. Earley said the film followed the real events closely with only minor Hollywood embellishments, though it omitted the role of white attorney Mike O’Connor, who played a significant part in the original investigation.1Pete Earley. I Watched the Real Just Mercy Story Unfold