Nathaniel Woods was condemned by a judge even though a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on his sentence. Advocates are urging the governor to intervene before his execution on Thursday.
Nathaniel Woods never pulled the trigger, but prosecutors said he was just as guilty as the man who did. He had been a mastermind, prosecutors said, luring police officers in Birmingham, Ala., into a house where three of them were killed.
Now, condemned to death row, Mr. Woods is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, as his supporters argue that the case against him was deeply flawed, and that no evidence existed of a plot to ambush the officers.
But in 2005, when he was on trial, prosecutors secured a conviction. And at his sentencing, prosecutors brought out witnesses who described Mr. Woods’s hatred of the police. Widows of the officers said they believed Mr. Woods ought to die.
Ten jurors agreed, but two others voted against the death penalty. Their objection was not enough to spare his life, as Alabama is unique in allowing a judge to sentence a defendant to death without a jury voting unanimously in favor of it.
The lack of a unanimous verdict has fueled some of the concerns over his case as death penalty activists and civil rights groups have urged the courts and Gov. Kay Ivey to intervene.
Some advocates point to courts in other states ruling that such sentences are unconstitutional and to evidence that the practice, now existing only in Alabama, “creates a heightened risk that an innocent person will be sentenced to death,” according to Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“I think that Alabama is still 50 years behind,” said Pamela Woods, Mr. Woods’s younger sister who has been working around the clock in recent weeks to stop his execution.
As his execution looms, his case has generated attention across Alabama and beyond as supporters have asked that his life be spared — or at least for his execution to be delayed. Martin Luther King III, the human rights activist and son of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote a letter to Ms. Ivey, asking her, “Are you willing to allow a potentially innocent man to be executed?”
Mr. Woods’s supporters have noted that there is no dispute that Mr. Woods was not the shooter, and that the actual gunman himself has also argued Mr. Woods’s innocence. They have also described woefully inept representation, with one lawyer abandoning him during his appeals process.
Mr. Woods, 44, turned down a plea deal of 20 to 25 years in prison, supporters said, because he had been misled into believing he could not be sentenced to death when he was not the gunman.
“At literally every step of the way, Nate’s counsel has let him down,” said Lauren Faraino, a lawyer in Birmingham who has been an ardent supporter of Mr. Woods.
Most states have abolished the ability to impose a death sentence based on only a majority of votes after the issue has come before the courts. In Alabama, where the State Supreme Court has upheld its constitutionality, at least 10 jurors have to vote in favor of the death penalty for the judge to impose it.
In one of the most recent cases, Christopher Price, who was convicted of robbing and killing a minister, was executed in May; the jury at his trial reached a 10-2 decision in favor of the death penalty.
“Historically, unanimity has been a hallmark of our jury system,” said Randy Susskind, the deputy director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization based in Montgomery, Ala., that seeks to fight mass incarceration and excessive punishment.
“In a death penalty case,” Mr. Susskind added, “where the jury is tasked with deciding whether someone should live or die — and they’re the conscience of the community, and they have already convicted the defendant of capital murder — the idea that the state is unable to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt is a pretty important factor.”
Delaware and Florida had also been among the limited number of states that allowed judges to sentence a person to death row without a unanimous verdict. But in Delaware, the State Supreme Court in 2016 ruled it unconstitutional. (Delaware has not carried out an execution since 2012.)
A legal battle over the role of jurors in Florida in determining death sentences ascended to the United States Supreme Court, which struck down parts of the state’s capital punishment system in 2016. As a result, state lawmakers instituted a requirement for a supermajority of 10 jurors voting in favor of the death penalty, but that was tossed by the Florida Supreme Court, which found such sentences required a unanimous vote.
But in January, the State Supreme Court reversed its previous decision, with a majority asserting that in the earlier ruling the justices “got it wrong.” The decision created a potential opening for state lawmakers to consider reverting to the former standard.
In 2017, Alabama became the last state in the country to end a practice in which judges were allowed to override a jury’s decision of a life sentence and impose the death penalty.
Judges in Alabama used the option to override a jury more than 100 times over four decades, a report by the Equal Justice Initiative found. In the vast majority of instances, judges overruled in favor of the harsher sentence. At one point, some 20 percent of death row inmates were condemned in cases involving a judicial override.
In the trial of Kerry Spencer, the man who prosecutors said plotted with Mr. Woods and fired at the officers, the judge overruled a jury’s decision to impose a sentence of life in prison without parole and instead sentenced him to death. Mr. Spencer remains on death row. (In a recent interview with The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that covers the criminal justice system, he called Mr. Woods “actually 100 percent innocent,” adding, “Nate ain’t done nothing.”)
The death penalty has been on the decline in the United States, with seven states carrying out 22 executions last year, the second-lowest number since 1991. Last year, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abandon capital punishment.
But Alabama has been among the states that has resisted that broader shift. Three inmates were executed in the state last year.
Ms. Ivey, the Republican governor in office since 2017, has expressed a measure of discomfort over her role in capital cases and she has avoided intervening in executions. “No governor covets the responsibility of weighing the merits of life or death,” she said after one execution. “But it is a burden I accept as part of my pledge to uphold the laws of this state.”
A federal judge on Monday dismissed Mr. Woods’s claims in denying a stay of execution, meaning an intervention by the governor was one of his few remaining options.
Ms. Ivey has not indicated whether she might step in Mr. Woods’s case. While her office did not respond to requests for comment this week, an advocate for Mr. Woods said that his supporters had met this week with representatives from her administration.
Prosecutors and the state attorney general’s office have declined to discuss the case.
The efforts to spare Mr. Woods have gained fresh momentum as his execution approaches. Ms. Faraino, a one-time corporate lawyer, had stumbled across a mention of Mr. Woods’s execution in an email newsletter and it drew her interest.
She and her mother pored over thousands of pages of records from Mr. Woods’s case. Ms. Faraino then wrote a lengthy report that she shared widely, detailing the shortcomings she found with the official handling of the case and with his lawyers, all of which, she argued, posed lethal consequences to Mr. Woods.
“The truth of the matter is,” she said, “no one has had the inclination or perhaps the resources to conduct an extensive study.”
In the final days before the execution, Ms. Faraino and Pamela Woods, Mr. Woods’s sister, have raced to draw more attention to the case. Ms. Woods went to the recent celebration for the 55th anniversary of the march in Selma to press civil rights activists to take on her brother’s case.
“Everybody knows that he’s innocent,” Ms. Woods said. “‘What if this?’ or ‘What if that?’ — it’s nothing like that. It’s as bright as day.”
She added, “It’s really important to me and my family that the truth gets out there.”
Source: The New York Times, Rick Rojas, March 5, 2020
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde