A life sen­tence recent­ly imposed in America’s dead­liest death-penal­ty coun­ty illus­trates the impact of Alabamas 2017 repeal of its for­mer law per­mit­ting tri­al judges to impose the death penal­ty despite jury votes for life. On August 9, 2019, Houston County Judge Larry Anderson sen­tenced Nathaniel Dennis to life in prison with­out parole for the mur­der of a con­ve­nience store clerk, after the jury in his case rec­om­mend­ed a life sen­tence. According to news reports, Anderson had want­ed to impose a death sen­tence, and only reluc­tant­ly acqui­esced in the jury’s recommendation.

Alabama was the last state in the U.S. to abol­ish judi­cial over­ride, which accounts for approx­i­mate­ly 20% of all Alabama death sen­tences and 11 of its 66 exe­cu­tions. It remains the only state in the coun­try to per­mit a tri­al judge to impose a death sen­tence based upon a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death.

Houston County has imposed more death sen­tences by far than any oth­er coun­ty its size. Despite a pop­u­la­tion just over 100,000, it cur­rent­ly has 19 peo­ple on its death row — the high­est per capi­ta death row of any coun­ty with more than two death-row pris­on­ers. As of January 1, 2013, Houston County’s death row ranked 30th in size among all coun­ties in the United States, even though it was less than one-quar­ter the size of any oth­er coun­ty in the top thir­ty and two-thirds of those coun­ties had pop­u­la­tions of more than one million.

Dennis was arrest­ed in 2012 for the rob­bery and mur­der of night-shift con­ve­nience store clerk Ernest Russell Douglas in 1981. At the time of his arrest, he was serv­ing a 634-year prison sen­tence in Virginia for assault­ing a cowork­er. Lawyers for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project are chal­leng­ing that con­vic­tion based upon an erro­neous eye­wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and con­fes­sions to five sep­a­rate peo­ple made by the man they say com­mit­ted the crime. The three-decades old Alabama cold case was still unsolved in 2011 when police ran hair sam­ples from the crime scene through a nation­al data­base. Hundreds of hairs had been recov­ered from the store, one of which was deter­mined to match Dennis, who had been liv­ing and work­ing in Alabama at that time. Dennis’s lawyers pre­sent­ed a defense that it was impos­si­ble for him to have com­mit­ted the mur­der. We are not argu­ing my client’s hair was not found at the crime scene,” his attor­ney said. We are argu­ing my client had an ali­bi, and fel­low co-work­ers, and his fel­low boss will tes­ti­fy my client was a wait­er at a very pop­u­lar night­club” who could not have slipped away dur­ing his busy shift on the night of the mur­der. Dennis’s lawyers also point­ed to anoth­er man who was linked to the mur­der by sev­er­al reports and argued that Dennis had no motive to com­mit the rob­bery because he was already mak­ing good mon­ey at the nightclub.