NEW SOURCE: National Georgraphic Connects Death Penalty and the town of ​“To Kill A Mockingbird”

The January 2006 edi­tion of the National Geographic fea­tures the town of Monroeville, Alabama, home of freed death row inmate Walter McMillian (pic­tured) and Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the arti­cle, which high­lights the town’s annu­al the­atri­cal trib­ute to Lee’s book, McMillian’s case is not­ed as ​“an eerie echo” of the book’s sto­ry­line. In a resem­blance to Lee’s black fic­tion­al char­ac­ter Tom Robinson, McMillian was con­vict­ed in 1987 of mur­der­ing a white woman in Monroeville despite a lack of reli­able evi­dence. He spent sev­en years on Alabama’s death row before attor­ney Bryan Stevenson, with some assis­tance from a piece on 60 Minutes, suc­cess­ful­ly achieved his exon­er­a­tion. McMillian returned to Monroeville after his release. (National Geographic, January 2006). See Innocence and Resources.