BOB BLALOCK: Overriding unfairness in state's death penalty sentencing

Bob Blalock By Bob Blalock The Birmingham News
on July 17, 2011 at 5:45 AM

Bobby Waldrop picked a bad time to be white.

A Randolph County jury had convicted the 19-year-old of murdering his grandparents. After hearing about Waldrop's crack addiction, his remorse over the killing and the love between him and his grandparents, the jury recommended a sentence of life without parole instead of the death penalty.

deathchamber.jpgAlabama's trial judges, not juries, decide who faces death in the lethal injection chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.

Judge Dale Segrest, who was up for re-election at the time of the sentencing, explained why he overrode the jury and sentenced Waldrop to death.

"If I had not imposed the death sentence, I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people," Segrest said, according to the sentencing hearing transcript from 2000.

As a new report that highlights the case noted: "In open court, he explained that he sentenced Mr. Waldrop (who is white) to death to show he was not racially biased in past cases."

It is likely one of the few times being white has been a disadvantage in Alabama's death-penalty system.

"We now recognize we have to throw in a white defendant every now and then to make it look less discriminatory," says Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm that represents the poor. "The death penalty has become so cheap in Alabama, we have become less cautious about who gets it. It is very troubling."

EJI's report, "The Death Penalty in Alabama: Judge Override," focuses on the unique, perverse practice in Alabama of allowing trial judges, with no meaningful standards, to override jury verdicts of life and impose death. "No capital sentencing procedure in the United States has come under more criticism as unreliable, unpredictable and arbitrary," the report says.

Who ends up on Death Row in Alabama ultimately lies in the hands of its elected judges, regardless of a jury's wishes. Alabama is the only state of 34 that impose the death penalty where judges regularly override jury verdicts of life and sentence defendants to death.

Since 1976, judges in Alabama have overridden jury verdicts 107 times, according to the EJI report. The law authorizes overrides of both life and death verdicts from a jury. Alabama judges have overturned life verdicts 98 times, but just nine times did they change a death verdict to life.

Stevenson says that wasn't exactly the vision for override in the 1970s when the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty. "Override was proposed as a mechanism for creating some mercy. Community animosity and frustration might prompt a death sentence when it was not warranted," he says.

Only three states -- Alabama, Delaware and Florida -- even allow judge override; the jury's verdict is final in the other 31. But Delaware and Florida, unlike Alabama, have strict standards for judges to follow.

No judge in Florida has imposed death through override since 1999, according to the EJI report. Just six people are on Florida's Death Row because of override. No one is on Death Row in Delaware because of override, which is usually used to impose life sentences. In Alabama, though, 41 of 199 Death Row inmates (21 percent) are there because of override.

"Judge override is the primary reason why Alabama has the highest per-capita death sentencing rate and execution rate in the country," the EJI report says.

Higher, even, than Texas, whose reputation for throwing the switch or, these days, plunging the needle is as large as, well, Texas.

No doubt, some readers will wonder why judge override is a bad thing. Surely, a judge knows better than a jury whether someone convicted of capital murder deserves to die. Maybe so, but of the people judges sentenced to death through override, 37 percent left Death Row because their convictions or sentences were reversed, according to the EJI report.

"Override in Alabama is characterized by arbitrariness and error -- it is shaped by geography, race and the lottery of which judge is drawn," the report says.


One day, Stevenson hopes, an override case will make it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which 35 years ago when it allowed the death penalty, ordered, as the EJI report put it, "heightened scrutiny and substantial oversight to ensure that every death sentence is rationally and fairly imposed."

That doesn't sound like Alabama, does it?
