In nearly all of the 32 states that permit capital punishment, a jury makes the final decision on whether a defendant will live or die. Not so in Alabama, where elected judges may override a jury verdict of life in prison and impose a death sentence.
This arrangement is the result of a state law requiring that capital punishment be imposed when a crime's aggravating factors, like an especially heinous murder, outweigh the mitigating factors, like a defendant's age or mental capacity. But regardless of how a jury weighs those factors, its verdict is advisory only. A judge may then weigh them differently and override the verdict without explanation.
Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to this law, which appears to violate a 2002 ruling that capital defendants "are entitled to a jury determination of any fact" necessary to sentence them to death.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a 12-page opinion dissenting from the court's decision. Sotomayor identified the reason Alabama's judges impose more death sentences per capita than any other state. The judges, "who are elected in partisan proceedings, appear to have succumbed to electoral pressures."
Judges are not shy about this. A 2000 campaign ad for one said he "has the tough-on-crime record to be chief justice." Another said he "looked into the eyes of murderers and sentenced them to death." One judge justified his override of a life sentence for a white defendant because otherwise, he said, "I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people."
In his dissent from the 1995 ruling upholding the Alabama law, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that overriding a jury verdict in this way severs "the death penalty from its only legitimate mooring."
It should have no mooring at all, and should not be imposed by a judge worried about his job.