Questions about the accu­ra­cy and fair­ness of Alabama’s death penal­ty con­tin­ue to sur­face as illus­trat­ed by a series of recent fed­er­al court rul­ings grant­i­ng two new tri­als and one new sen­tenc­ing hear­ing. All of the rul­ings were based on inad­e­quate rep­re­sen­ta­tion pro­vid­ed to the defen­dants. ​“Counsel sim­ply pro­vid­ed no defense to the death penal­ty,” Chief U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon of Birmingham wrote March 31 in giv­ing one of the inmates a new tri­al. The man has been on death row 22 years. Most of Alabama’s death row inmates were con­vict­ed when the state had extreme­ly low caps on indi­gent defense fees at tri­al. In addi­tion, the state has not mod­i­fied its law to com­ply with the U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion in Atkins v. Virginia (regard­ing the men­tal­ly retard­ed), and main­tains that no changes are need­ed to com­ply with Ring v. Arizona (regard­ing the jury’s role in deter­min­ing death eli­gi­bil­i­ty). Bryan Stevenson, an Alabama defense attor­ney and direc­tor of the Equal Justice Initiative, not­ed: ​“What that means is that every month, every sea­son, more peo­ple are being tried and sen­tenced to death in what are prob­a­bly uncon­sti­tu­tion­al pro­ce­dures. Rather than deal with it now and save fam­i­ly mem­bers of vic­tims, and tax­pay­ers, pros­e­cu­tors and defense lawyers all the agony of years of appeals, we’re act­ing as if it’s not a prob­lem.” Moreover, he said, ​“We’re the only state that does noth­ing to make sure Death Row pris­on­ers get legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion to pur­sue their post-con­vic­tion appeals. And the rea­son why that’s a huge deal is that many inno­cent Death Row pris­on­ers, those pris­on­ers whose con­vic­tions have been ille­gal­ly obtained, have proved their inno­cence or the ille­gal­i­ty of those con­vic­tions in these post-con­vic­tion appeals.” (Associated Press, May 2, 2004) See Supreme Court, Representation, Innocence, and Mental Retardation.

Citation Guide