Legal Lynching as Jeffery Lee was Murdered Yesterday: Although a Jury’s Decision to Impose a Life Sentence Can't be Overruled, Alabama Authorities Did So Anyway per the ‘We Can Kill NGHRS’ Exception

From [HERE] An Alabama jury rejected the death penalty for Jeffery Lee and decided that life imprisonment without parole is the appropriate punishment in his case. The State nonetheless executed Mr. Lee by lethal injection today.

Mr. Lee’s Jury Chose Life Imprisonment

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.

Florida and Delaware—the only other states that permitted judge override—ended it in 2016. Alabama became the last state to abolish judge override on April 11, 2017, but did not apply the change retroactively to cases like Mr. Lee’s.

Mr. Lee’s case demonstrates the arbitrariness of Alabama’s death penalty. If his trial happened today—or at any time after judge override was abolished in 2017—he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole as a jury of his peers decided. Instead, he was executed because his capital trial was held before 2017, when Alabama law still allowed a single official to override the judgment of the 12 people charged with deciding his fate.

The Alabama Legislature and Gov. Kay Ivey abolished judge override because they recognized it was wrong, former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Drayton Nabers Jr. wrote in a recent op-ed. He called on the governor to commute Mr. Lee’s death sentence out of “fidelity to the conservative principles of limited government, respect for the jury system, and the rule of law.”

“A jury of Alabamians voted for life,” he wrote. “The state of Alabama later agreed that juries, not judges, should make that call. Governor Ivey can honor both of those judgments—the jury’s and the Legislature’s—by commuting Jeffery Lee’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.” [MORE]