Death Meted Out by Politicians in Robes

Since 1982, Alabama judges have overridden 95 such verdicts, sentencing defendants to death even though the jury voted for life — many times by a vote of 12 to 0.

This bizarre arrangement is the result of a state law requiring that capital punishment be imposed when a crime’s aggravating factors, like an especially heinous murder or one committed for hire, outweigh the mitigating factors, like a defendant’s age or mental capacity. But regardless of how a jury weighs those factors, its verdict is advisory only. A judge may then weigh them differently and override the verdict without explanation. In more than 90 percent of overrides, judges chose death after a jury chose life.

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to this law, which appears to violate a 2002 ruling that capital defendants “are entitled to a jury determination of any fact” necessary to sentence them to death.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a 12-page opinion, joined partly by Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting from the court’s decision not to hear the current case, Woodward v. Alabama. While the court previously upheld the Alabama law in 1995, she noted, the state is now alone in overriding jury verdicts of life. Because it undermines “the sanctity of the jury’s role in our system of criminal justice,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, the Alabama law is “constitutionally suspect.”

Justice Sotomayor rightly identified the reason Alabama’s judges impose more death sentences per capita than any other state. The judges, she wrote, “who are elected in partisan proceedings, appear to have succumbed to electoral pressures.”

The judges are not shy about this fact. A 2000 campaign ad for one said he “has the tough-on-crime record to be chief justice.” Another bragged that he “looked into the eyes of murderers and sentenced them to death.” One judge told The Birmingham News in 2011 that voter reaction does “have some impact, especially in high-profile cases.” Nor is it any more comforting when the judges decide to explain themselves. One judge justified his override of a life sentence for a white defendant because otherwise, he said, “I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people.”

In his dissent from the 1995 ruling upholding the Alabama law, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that allowing a judge to override a jury verdict in this way severs “the death penalty from its only legitimate mooring.”

The death penalty should have no legitimate mooring at all in modern American society, and it certainly should not be imposed by a judge who is worried about keeping his job.