Former Republican and Democratic Governors from Alabama Critique State’s Death Penalty and Express Regret

“[W]e have come over time to see the flaws in our nation’s jus­tice sys­tem and to view the state’s death penal­ty laws in par­tic­u­lar as legal­ly and moral­ly trou­bling,” wrote two for­mer gov­er­nors of Alabama in an op-ed for the Washington Post. Republican Robert Bentley (pic­tured, right) and Democrat Don Siegelman (pic­tured, left) agree that the 146 peo­ple whose death sen­tences were imposed by non-unan­i­mous juries or judi­cial over­ride should have their sen­tences com­mut­ed. ​“We missed our chance to con­front the death penal­ty and have lived to regret it,” they wrote, ​“but it is not too late for today’s elect­ed offi­cials to do the moral­ly right thing.”

In sup­port of their rec­om­men­da­tion, the authors acknowl­edged the racist under­pin­nings of non-unan­i­mous ver­dicts as a Jim Crow prac­tice dat­ing from the 1870s. Alabama had been the only state to allow a per­son to be sen­tenced to death by this legal rel­ic. They not­ed 115 peo­ple were sen­tenced to die by non-unan­i­mous jury ver­dicts, and an addi­tion­al 31 peo­ple were sen­tenced to death by judges who over­rode jury rec­om­men­da­tions for life. The authors cit­ed research by the Equal Justice Initiative that indi­cates judi­cial over­rides may have been influ­enced by judges’ polit­i­cal con­cerns. Judicial over­rides made up ​“7 per­cent of death sen­tences in a non­elec­tion year but rose to 30 per­cent when Alabama judges ran for reelection.”

The for­mer gov­er­nors rec­om­mend that the 146 peo­ple sen­tenced under the out­lier prac­tices of non-una­nim­i­ty and judi­cial over­ride receive reduced sen­tences, ​“and that an inde­pen­dent review unit should be estab­lished to exam­ine all cap­i­tal murder convictions.” 

The gov­er­nors also dis­cuss the link between offi­cial mis­con­duct and wrong­ful con­vic­tions, point­ing to the exon­er­a­tion of Walter McMillian, as well as the cas­es of two men on death row who may be inno­cent and whose sen­tences involved both mis­con­duct and out­lier sen­tenc­ing prac­tices. Toforest Johnson was sen­tenced to death by a non-unan­i­mous jury after pros­e­cu­tors with­held evi­dence that the key wit­ness against Johnson received a secret $5000 reward. Rocky Myers, ​“was nev­er con­nect­ed to the mur­der scene, and even though the jury rec­om­mend­ed life with­out parole, the judge over­rode the rec­om­men­da­tion and ordered his exe­cu­tion.” Siegelman also wrote that he is ​“per­son­al­ly haunt­ed” by his deci­sion to allow the exe­cu­tion of Freddie Wright in 2000, because he now believes Wright is innocent.

During the 2023 leg­isla­tive ses­sion, Rep. Chris England (D — Tuscaloosa) pro­posed a bill to allow the death penal­ty only when a jury unan­i­mous­ly rec­om­mends it. Under exist­ing law, a death sen­tence can be imposed if at least 10 jurors rec­om­mend death. The bill would retroac­tive­ly reduced the death sen­tences of the 146 peo­ple dis­cussed in the op-ed — those whose death sen­tences were non-unan­i­mous, and those who were sen­tenced under judi­cial over­ride. At a May 24, 2023 hear­ing on the bill, Mae Puckett, who served as a juror in the tri­al of Rocky Myers, said, ​“What was the point of us ever being there if we weren’t going to mat­ter? Why did we have to sit and lis­ten to these hor­ri­ble things? And see those pic­tures that we had to see? He was accused of stab­bing a woman to death. I don’t under­stand why we had to go through that for this man to have just turned around and say, ​‘No, it doesn’t mat­ter, I know what we need to do.’ And this man has been on death row for 25 years.” The bill did not receive a vote before time ran out for it to be con­sid­ered this legislative session.