Judge Override | Equal Justice Initiative

Of the 35 states with the death penalty, Alabama is one of only three that allow a trial judge to override a jury’s verdict of life without parole and impose death. Of these three, Alabama is the only state that elects trial judges in partisan elections. The other two states, Florida and Delaware, have long maintained tight regulations on a trial judge’s ability to overrule the jury’s judgment in this way. By contrast, no meaningful standards regulate an Alabama trial judge’s ability to ignore a jury’s recommendation of life without parole.

Since 1976, more than 80 people have been sentenced to death by judges in Alabama even though their juries decided that death was not the appropriate punishment.

Fueled by "tough on crime" rhetoric in partisan judicial elections, judicial override in Alabama is on the rise. More than a quarter of Alabama’s current death row prisoners were condemned to death by an elected judge through override of a jury life verdict. In 2008, an election year, 30% of the death sentences were imposed by judicial override of jury life verdicts.

The Alabama Supreme Court recently held in some cases that when a jury has recommended life without parole, the trial judge must give serious consideration to that recommendation and can set it aside and impose death only if he provides a convincing written explanation of the problems with the jury’s verdict.

Alabama judges have nonetheless overruled unanimous life verdicts, such as in the cases of death row prisoners Shonnell Jackson, William Bush, and Oscar Doster, and several judges routinely override capital sentencing juries, such as Mobile County Judge Ferrell McRae, who has rejected jury verdicts for life in five cases and never overruled a jury's verdict for death.

The constitutionality of Alabama's override scheme has been called into question by the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002), which held that juries, not judges, must make the factual findings statutorily required before a death sentence can be imposed. The decision struck down statutes that permitted a judge, without a jury, to determine whether a defendant could receive the death penalty, and leaves Alabama as the only state where virtually unrestricted judicial override still plays a major role in capital cases.

Override is particularly problematic in Alabama because Alabama judges are selected in hotly contested partisan elections in which judges campaign on their record of imposing death sentences. Together with the absence of a statewide public defender system, prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination, and geographic disparities in the death sentencing rate, the practice of judicial override raises concerns about the fairness, reliability, and constitutionality of death sentencing in Alabama.