Justices May Weigh Cases of Alabama Judges Overriding Juries

By Washington Post

In 2009, an Alabama jury convicted Christie Scott of murdering her 6-year-old son by setting a fire in her home. It then voted to spare her life.
 

Judge Terry L. Dempsey of the Circuit Court in Russellville rejected that verdict and sentenced Ms. Scott to death. “This jury was probably emotionally and mentally worn out,” he said, adding that jurors might have been swayed by testimony from the victim’s family seeking leniency.
 

A year later, on the other side of the state, a jury unanimously recommended that Courtney Lockhart, a veteran of the Iraq war, be spared the death penalty for murdering Lauren Burk, a college student.

Judge Jacob A. Walker III of the Circuit Court in Opelika overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced Mr. Lockhart to death — but for the opposite reason. Judge Walker said Ms. Burk’s family had asked for the death penalty, which “weighs in favor of judicial override.”

The Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear one or both of the cases — Scott v. Alabama, No. 14-8189, and Lockhart v. Alabama, No. 14-8194 — and to take a new look at the unusual power Alabama gives to its judges. The court has lately been interested in other aspects of capital sentencing, agreeing on Monday to consider a challenge to Florida’s system in Hurst v. Florida, No. 14-7505.

 

Alabama is one of three with laws on the books allowing judges to reject juries’ sentencing recommendations in capital cases. In the past decade, it has been alone in sending defendants to death row after juries determined that the just sentence was life in prison. Alabama law allows judges to override jury recommendations in either direction: from life to death or from death to life. But Alabama judges mostly choose death.

 

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, judges in Alabama have overridden recommendations of life 101 times and of death just 10 times.

Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court upheld Alabama’s capital-sentencing system. But at least two justices seem ready to reconsider that ruling.
 

In a 2013 dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said it was time for the court to re-examine a system that let “a single trial judge’s view to displace that of a jury representing a cross section of the community.”
 

Alabama jurors are not notably squeamish about the death penalty, and those opposed to it are automatically excluded from service. In Mr. Lockhart’s case, the prosecution excluded 10 potential jurors based on doubts about their commitment to capital punishment.
 

Delaware and Florida also allow overrides. But no one has been sentenced to death in Florida as a result of a judicial override since 1999, and no one is on death row in Delaware as a consequence of an override. In Alabama, by contrast, more than 20 percent of the inmates on death row are there because of judicial overrides.
 

Mr. Lockhart’s case is already on the Supreme Court’s radar. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, in a case involving a different condemned inmate, included an unusual footnote about Mr. Lockhart. She seemed to want to describe an extreme case.