Updated

Updated · The New York Times · Sep 12

Alabama Set to Execute Jeffery Lee, 49, After Judge Overrode Jury’s Life Sentence

Updated

Updated · The New York Times · Sep 12

Alabama Set to Execute Jeffery Lee, 49, After Judge Overrode Jury’s Life Sentence

Q: Why did a single judge ignore a jury's plea for life and send Jeffery Lee to death row?

Jeffery Lee was sent to death row because Alabama law at the time allowed a trial judge to override a jury’s sentencing recommendation in a capital case. In 2000, Lee’s jury voted 7–5 for life without parole, but the judge used that now-abolished power to impose death instead. That system, known as judicial override, gave a single judge the authority to reject the punishment recommendation made by the 12 jurors who heard the case. Alabama used it more aggressively than any other state. Between 1976 and 2017, Alabama judges overrode jury sentencing decisions 112 times, and in about 91% of those cases, they changed life recommendations into death sentences. The judge in Lee’s case was acting within then-existing state law, even though that same practice was later ended. Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, becoming the last state to do so. But lawmakers did not make the repeal retroactive, so Lee and more than two dozen others remained on death row even though they would not be sentenced that way today. That is why Lee’s case has become a flashpoint. Critics say it shows how a single official could nullify a jury’s plea for life. Supporters of clemency argue that if Alabama concluded in 2017 that judges should no longer have that power, it is hard to justify carrying out older override death sentences now.

3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Sep 12

Jeffery Lee, 49, is days from execution in Alabama even though jurors who convicted him in the 1998 pawnshop killings chose life without parole over death.
A judge later imposed a death sentence under Alabama’s now-banned judicial override system, which let judges reject jury sentencing recommendations until the state ended the practice in 2017.
The case stems from a 1998 robbery in which Lee, then 21, entered a pawnshop with a sawed-off shotgun, killed the owner and his ex-wife, and wounded a clerk who survived by pretending to be dead.
Lee is one of more than two dozen Alabama death-row inmates whose sentences were imposed by judges rather than juries, keeping a discontinued sentencing practice alive years after it was outlawed.