Alabama Judges Impose Death Though Juries Vote For Life In Prison

Last November, jurors in Lee County, Ala., found Courtney Lockhart, a 26-year-old Iraq War veteran, guilty of the 2008 murder of Lauren Burk, an 18-year-old college student.

During sentencing, all 12 members of the jury recommended that Lockhart serve life in prison without the possibility of parole for his crime. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, but the defense argued for lenience, presenting evidence that Lockhart had suffered psychological damage during a bloody 16-month combat tour in Iraq.

The jurors' unanimous decision to spare Lockhart's life was not the final word, however. On March 3, 2011, Judge Jacob Walker, who presided over the trial, nullified the jury's recommendation of life without parole and sentenced Lockhart to death by lethal injection.

In a lengthy decision, the judge wrote that Lockhart deserved death because of evidence of other crimes not presented by prosecutors during his trial. Had the jury heard these "additional facts," he wrote, "their sentencing recommendation would likely have differed."

In virtually all 35 states that allow the death penalty, juries are the supreme arbiter of whether capital defendants live or die. But not in Alabama. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty after a four-year ban, Alabama judges have held the power to overturn the sentencing recommendations of juries in capital cases.

Since then, state judges have overturned 107 jury decisions in capital cases, and in 92 percent of those cases, jury recommendations of life imprisonment were rejected in favor of death sentences, according to a new report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law firm based in Montgomery, Ala.

The group's report is strongly critical of the practice, calling it arbitrary and lacking meaningful standards or oversight.

"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," it states.

Alabama has the highest per capita death sentencing rate in the country; last year, the state, with a population of 4.5 million, sentenced more offenders to death than Texas, with a population of nearly 25 million. And more than one in five prisoners now on death row in Alabama are there because of judicial override of jury decisions, the report found.

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Source: Huffington