The article “Alabama Is Set to Execute a Murderer; The Jury Wanted Him to Live” appeared in the New York Times on September 12th.
At Jeffery Lee’s capital trial in 2000, an Alabama jury voted 7-5 against the death penalty and chose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. The trial judge overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced Mr. Lee to death in 2000, relying on a unique Alabama practice that allowed judges to overrule jury verdicts in death penalty cases.
Alabama is the only state where judges overrode jury verdicts of life to impose the death penalty routinely, in more than 100 cases since 1976. As a result, nearly 20% of the people currently on Alabama’s death row were sentenced to death by elected judges even after their juries chose life imprisonment without parole. The only other states that permitted judge override, Florida and Delaware, ended it in 2016. Alabama became the last state to abolish judge override in April 2017, but did not apply the change retroactively to cases like Lee’s.
Excerpts from the New York Times article appear below.
A jury in Alabama heard harrowing testimony about a bungled pawnshop robbery in 1998 that quickly turned to bloodshed: Jeffery Lee, 21, charged in with a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire. The store’s owner, hit in the chest and arm, and his ex-wife, who was shot point-blank in the face, were killed. A clerk was wounded; she played dead until Mr. Lee fled.
Jurors voted unanimously to convict him. But when it came to deciding whether Mr. Lee should be put to death, most of the panel opted instead to sentence him to life in prison without parole.
And yet, nearly three decades later, Mr. Lee is on death row, his execution just days away.
Officials in Alabama — which has long had the highest number of death sentences per capita in the country — have resolved to push ahead with executions, even as they wrestle with the legacy of old flawed policies and as limited access to lethal injection drugs has prompted a search for new methods.
And in Mr. Lee’s case, those officials have defended the death sentence as just. “There is absolutely no question as to his guilt,” Steve Marshall, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, said in a statement. “Anything short of carrying out the sentence imposed by the court falls short of justice for the victims, and that is not what victims of this state deserve.”
Still, prominent legal and political figures in Alabama — including some Republicans who are generally supportive of the death penalty — have demanded clemency for Mr. Lee.
“When a state concludes that a sentencing practice was unjust — unjust enough to abolish by statute — it ought to reckon with the sentences that practice produced,” Drayton Nabers Jr., a former chief justice of the State Supreme Court and a Republican, wrote in an essay published in June in newspapers across the state.
Since June, Mr. Lee said, he has been caught between relief, as the day he believed could be his last turned out not to be, and dread, as he realizes a last-minute intervention is less likely this time around. He tries not to think about it.
Instead, Mr. Lee, who trained as a minister in prison, said he was leaning once again on the faith that had carried him throughout his time on death row.
“When I stop and choose to focus on what’s going on, I get stuck there,” he said. “I choose each and every day to wake up and not be fearful and afraid.”
You can read the full article “Alabama Is Set to Execute a Murderer. The Jury Wanted Him to Live” via this gift link at the New York Times.
