Overdue fix to judicial imbalance
Last week, Alabama was the last state in the U.S. whose laws empowered a judge to overrule a jury’s sentencing verdict in a death penalty case. This week, it joined the rest of the country in taking that life-or-death decision out of the hands of one official, and capital punishment politics out of the sentencing process.
It’s encouraging to note that legislative support in Montgomery for ending this archaic and morally dubious practice was not partisan, and not close. The bill sailed through the House on Tuesday by a 78-19 margin after near-unanimous (30-1) Senate approval in February. Gov. Robert Bentley, who is facing his own legal troubles of a different order, said after final House passage that he looked forward to signing it.
"It was a bad practice," Sen. Dick Brewbaker, R-Montgomery, the bill’s chief sponsor, told the Montgomery Advertiser. "It showed a lack of confidence in Alabama juries, and I just think we came to the same conclusion of 49 other states. It just took longer."
Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, author of the House version, said the practice of judicial override “almost undermines the constitutional right to trial by a jury of your peers.”
Even worse, to many of the law’s critics, than the usurpation of jury authority to decide sentencing in capital cases was the possibility — in some cases, almost certainly, the likelihood — of politics hanging over the decision of whether a convicted criminal lived or died.
Records compiled by the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative show that judges in Alabama have overruled jury sentencing recommendations 112 times. In 11 of those cases, the judge changed a jury’s recommendation of the death penalty to a life sentence. In the other 101, the judge changed a jury’s recommendation of a life sentence to a sentence of execution. Brewbaker noted in Senate committee meetings on the bill that more than half of the overrides between 2005 and 2015 were in election years. "No matter how you feel about override philosophically, no one thinks sentencing should be affected by the election cycle," he told the Advertiser.
Current Alabama law requires the consent of at least 10 jurors for a jury to recommend a death sentence. England’s original bill would have changed that to require a unanimous vote: "Why would it take a unanimous jury to convict but less than a unanimous jury to send someone to death?" England said in an al.com report. But the bill with that change lacked the votes for passage, and ending judicial override was the objective anyway.
“Judicial override is about to become a thing of the past, and Alabama’s justice system will be better as a result,” Kimble Forrister, executive director of Alabama Arise, said in a statement on the nonprofit’s website. “It’s time for our state to put the sentencing decisions in death penalty cases where they belong: in the jury’s hands.”
We agree. So, it’s gratifying to see, do an overwhelming majority of Alabama lawmakers.
This story was originally published April 6, 2017 at 4:54 PM with the headline "Overdue fix to judicial imbalance."