Using the Death Penalty to Get Re-Elected

Alabama judges seem to impose the ultimate judgment more often in an election year.

While most of the country was riveted by the verdict in the Casey Anthony case -- invoking the O.J. trial and decrying what many regarded as an unjust verdict -- the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit criminal-defense and civil rights law and advocacy firm, released yet another in a series of reports that clearly demonstrate that the criminal-justice system, especially in the South, is broken and dangerously on the brink of illegitimacy. 

The EJI's latest report (pdf) focuses on a little-known practice, permitted in only three states: judicial override. Florida, Delaware and Alabama allow judges to overturn jury-sentencing verdicts in death penalty cases. 

There are no individuals on death row in Delaware as a result of judicial override, and no judge has imposed a capital punishment override in Florida in the last 12 years. But according to the EJI report, judicial override in Alabama is almost always exercised to impose the death penalty when a jury has recommended life in prison. In fact, although judges have the authority under Alabama law to override a jury's sentence of death and to instead impose a life sentence, 92 percent of judicial overrides are used to order death. 

According to EJI estimates, there are 40 men on death row in Alabama who were placed there after a judge overrode a jury's sentence of life in prison. 

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Source: The Root, July 20, 2011