MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- A new report from the Equal Justice Initiative says that of the 34 U.S. states with the death penalty, Alabama is the only jurisdiction where judges routinely override jury verdicts of life to impose capital punishment.
Since 1976, according to the report, Alabama judges have overridden jury verdicts 107 times. Although judges have authority to override life or death verdicts, in 92 percent of overrides elected judges have overruled jury verdicts of life to impose the death penalty.
"No capital sentencing procedure in the united States has come under more criticism as unreliable, unpredictable, and arbitrary than the unique Alabama practice of permitting elected trial judges to override jury verdicts of life and impose death sentences," the Montgomery-based organization wrote.
The organization claims that judicial override of jury recommendations "is the primary reason why Alabama has the highest per-capita death sentencing rate and execution rate in the country." Last year, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, Alabama, with a population of 4.5 million people, imposed more new death sentences than Texas, with a population of 24 million.
In a New York Times report today, 2 coastal Alabama judges were referenced, with Judge Ferrill D. McRae, who retired in 2006 after 40 years on the bench in Mobile, saying he thought judges need the discretion to override juries because judges have experience with many cases.
The Times report also notes a case presided over by Charles C. Partin, who sat in Bay Minette. In that case, Partin argued that the defendant was probably not mentally disabled, though the jury may have factored that in its thinking when it rendered a recommendation of life in prison. “The sociological literature suggests that Gypsies intentionally test low on standard I.Q. tests,” Partin wrote in the 1990 sentencing order.
The "Gypsy" case, according to Press-Register files, involves John Lionel Neal,
John Lionel Neal, 43, first convicted of capital murder in 1990 in the murder of 77-year-old Wilma Underwood, who was killed during a burglary of her Foley home.
Neal's fingerprints were found in a pocketbook in Underwood's ransacked house. Her television set was later found in Neal's Covington, La., home, officials with the case said. Neal was arrested in Detroit and placed in the Baldwin County jail on May 29, 1987.
Neal's first conviction and death sentence were overturned, with an appeals court faulting the jury selection process.
Then, in the spring of 1994, a second jury found Neal guilty and recommended he be executed. However, in 2008, an agreement was reached to decrease Neal's sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole after lawyers continued arguing on his behalf.
That agreement came as Neal's lawyers planned to argue in a pending hearing that Neal is mentally retarded, which a state evaluation had supported. A 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision deemed the execution of mentally retarded individuals as cruel and unusual punishment.
! I saw some of it on TV and I had to turn it off as it making me sick telling to listening to her. How the hell does donating her hair make what she did any less evil?? I would not want her hair on my head! I would rather go to a groomer and uses the dogs fur!
