A jury said they should live. A judge in Alabama decided they would die anyway.
Now, it’s up to Gov. Kay Ivey to decide who the state should listen to.
In Alabama, a jury’s decision wasn’t always the final word. And even though the state fixed that nine years ago, it’s still honoring old cases where a judge set aside the work of the jury—the only state in the nation to do so.
More than two dozen people are still on death row awaiting execution after judges reasoned, in their own varying ways, that they knew better than the jury.
Gov. Kay Ivey made sure Alabama abandoned the process—called judicial override—by signing a law on her first day in office in 2017. But the law applied only to new cases. It did not have any effect on those people sentenced to die under the practice prior to 2017.
Now, nearly ten years later, Ivey could use her last days in office to move the remaining 25 people on death row to the actual sentences their juries wanted and voted for: life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“I hope the governor is using her last few months to think about how she can leave a legacy of criminal justice reform in this state,” said A’Niya Robinson, the director of policy and organizing for the ACLU of Alabama.
Ivey’s stance is unclear.
There is no doubt she leaves a mark on the criminal justice system in this state. Alabama is building a new mega prison in Elmore County, set to be finished this fall and costing well over a billion dollars. It will be named after her.
But her record is more complicated.
Ivey set a record among Alabama governors in the modern era by approving the most executions, 26. And Alabama was an innovator of execution methods under Ivey’s watch, performing the nation’s first execution by nitrogen in January 2024.
Yet, she stopped judicial override upon taking office. She ordered a halt to lethal injection executions for several months in 2022, after the Alabama Department of Corrections couldn’t get it right. While she resumed the practice, some were astonished she had even paused it at all.
And she has also spared the most people from execution among all modern governors, too. She commuted the sentences of two men slated to die, something that does not happen often in Alabama, earning sharp criticism from fellow Republicans in the Attorney General’s office. In one case, Ivey said she had too many questions about guilt to move forward with an execution. In the other, the governor said she couldn’t “proceed in good conscience” to approve the execution of a man who wasn’t the actual shooter in the case, while the shooter was serving a life sentence.
Ivey isn’t running again and will leave the governor’s mansion in January when the state’s new governor, either Democrat Doug Jones or Republican Tommy Tuberville, is sworn in.
‘They didn’t need a jury’
One of the people whom a jury wished to live, but a judge sentenced to die, was Robin “Rocky” Myers.
Myers was on death row from 1994 until 2025, when Ivey commuted his sentence, sending him to life in prison instead of an execution chamber because she said she wasn’t sure he was guilty. Myers has always maintained his innocence in the killing of his Decatur neighbor.
Years after Myers was sent to death row, a juror began speaking out, too.
Mae Puckett told AL.com in 2023 that she didn’t know a judge could change the sentence that she and the other jurors handed down. To Puckett, a life sentence was a compromise: She and several other jurors had agreed, in a jury room stalemate, to convict the 30-year-old father if he could be sentenced to life.
“Those of us who thought he was innocent had very strong feelings about it... (but) we knew those guys weren’t going to change their mind,” she said. “We decided to vote him guilty… the best thing we thought we could do was spare his life.”
To find someone guilty of capital murder, all 12 jurors have to agree. The decision has to be unanimous. Then, if prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, there is a second hearing following the trial to decide if the person should be sent to death row.
After hearing the testimony, jurors go back to deliberate for the second time. But a death vote doesn’t have to be unanimous in Alabama.
A death sentence can be handed down only if 10 or more jurors vote for death. If the jury can’t reach that vote, they can consider a sentence of life without parole.
But prior to 2017, Alabama had a loophole. The jury’s sentence was, technically, just a recommendation. A judge could, for a litany of different and vague reasons, disregard the jury’s sentencing decision. While a judge could alternatively overturn a death vote and send a person to prison for life, it was almost always applied the other way.
That’s what happened in the Myers case.
Puckett said she had no idea the judge could change the outcome.
“I cried,” Puckett recalled. “It was a mix of anger and sympathy and remorse. I felt like I had just fed him to the wolves when we tried so hard not to do that.”
According to information gathered by the Equal Justice Initiative, Alabama judges changed a jury’s sentencing verdict 107 times from 1976 to 2011. And 98 of those changes increased the penalty from life to death.
Jeffery Lee is set to die by lethal injection later this month, even though that’s not what his jury voted for either. He was convicted of killing two people and injuring a third during a pawn shop robbery in Orrville in 1998. His jury, in a 7-5 vote, opted to send him to live out his days in prison.
One of the people who served on that jury wants Ivey to commute Lee’s sentence and send him to prison for life.
“I didn’t know that a judge could do that,” the juror said during a phone call with AL.com. “The system just did what it wanted to do, and it didn’t matter what the jury had decided.”
The woman, who didn’t want her name used for fear of retaliation, called the issue a systemic one and said she wants her verdict honored. “If the judge was going to make the final decision, why have a trial? That was a waste of time for everybody.”
“If it was a judge’s decision, they didn’t need a jury.”
Only in Alabama
The practice of judicial override had only been legal in a few states: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, and Indiana. Indiana got rid of the practice in 2002. Delaware and Florida also abolished override and made it apply to older cases, and they never routinely executed people who were sentenced under the practice.
In 2017, Alabama was all alone. And in 2026, the state still is the only place carrying out executions that resulted from a judge’s single-handed decision, disregarding a jury verdict.
Starting in 2006, Alabama State Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, introduced bills in the state legislature to outlaw the practice. They didn’t go anywhere.
“I had tried so many years because I felt that was extremely unfair,” Sanders told AL.com. “Because in effect, they were taking away the right to trial by jury.”
“There’s a unique unfairness about that.”
Eventually, Republican Sen. Dick Brewbaker took interest in the topic. Sanders said he was surprised and glad to have his support. Instead of co-sponsoring the bill with Brewbaker, Sanders dropped his name from the bill so it would have a better chance of passing under a Republican sponsor.
It worked.
The bill passed a vote of 78-19, and in April 2017, on her first day in the office, Ivey signed into law a ban on judicial override.
The law had a caveat: the ban on judicial override did not apply to those sentenced before 2017. Retroactivity wasn’t included in the bill, said Sanders, because it could have hurt the bill’s chances at passing.
Ignoring juries
There are currently 25 people on Alabama’s Death Row who were sent there after a judge disregarded a jury’s recommendation for life. The number has dwindled over the years after several have been put to death, some got new trials, and others died in their cells. While many have challenged their sentences in court, judges have sided with Alabama in those cases and haven’t taken anyone off death row because a judge alone sent them there.
Bills aimed at applying the ban backward and switching the sentences of those to life in prison have not moved in Montgomery.
Of the people on death row in this situation, there are 24 men and one woman. The old judicial override sentences account for 16% of the inmates on death row today.
Out of that 25, five stand out. In those cases, a jury voted 12-0 against the death penalty. Despite not a single juror voting for execution, they remain on death row.
“Because of the seriousness of the sentence, it’s hard to get 12 people to agree about anything these days,” said Robinson, who works for the ACLU. “The fact that they were able to come to an agreement after deliberating and because of the seriousness—you can’t reverse an execution—I would hope she would take a closer look at, if not all, especially those (unanimous cases).”
Ulysses Charles Sneed had one of those unanimous juries. He was part of a robbery turned murder. He wasn’t the shooter.
Shonelle Jackson was another. He was 18 at the time of the 1997 shooting.
David Roberts, another man on death row under a judicial override sentence, had a jury who voted 7-5 to send him to life in prison without parole. Now, he sits at a state mental hospital while the courts argue “whether (his) concept of reality is so impaired that he cannot grasp the execution’s meaning and purpose or the link between his crime and its punishment,” a judge wrote.
Judges didn’t always offer clear reasons as to why they disregarded a jury’s sentence in the two dozen cases.
In multiple cases, judges doubted the emotional toughness of juries. One judge theorized the jury was “probably emotionally and mentally worn out” after the defendant’s family asked them for mercy. Another judge said jury “outbursts” showed they were incapable of rendering a death sentence recommendation.
In some cases, judges simply said the heinousness of the crimes was enough to warrant execution regardless of how the jury saw it.
‘It is not too late’
As the years have passed since 2017, current and former Alabama officials from both sides of the aisle have spoken out in favor of doing away with the old sentences.
In 2023, former Alabama Govs. Robert Bentley, a Republican, and Don Siegelman, a Democrat, penned an opinion piece shared nationally about their regret in approving executions.
The former governors said that, if they were in power today, they would commute the sentences of those on death row who were doomed under judicial override or by non-unanimous juries.
“We missed our chance to confront the death penalty and have lived to regret it, but it is not too late for today’s elected officials to do the morally right thing,” the governors wrote.
And in 2024, the two former governors showed support for a bill that would have applied the ban on judicial override to those on death row and sent them to prison for life.
The governors aren’t the only ones crossing party lines to unite against judicial override sentences.
Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justices Sue Bell Cobb, Roy Moore, and Drayton Nabers Jr. are on opposing sides of the political aisle. Judicial override is a topic they all agree on.
Moore, a Republican, wrote in an opinion piece, “This is not a political issue, but an issue of life itself.”
“This is not a Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, left or right problem. I support the death penalty and will continue to do so, but only when given by a jury, which should have the last word.
Nabers, a Republican, also penned an opinion column, writing, "When a state concludes that a sentencing practice was unjust—unjust enough to abolish by statute—it ought to reckon with the sentences that practice produced. To say that the system was wrong going forward but that its past results must stand is not a principled position. It is an administrative convenience.”
During a phone call with AL.com, Cobb, a Democrat, agreed.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has clearly ruled that judicial overrides are unconstitutional,” she said. “The Alabama legislature revised our law to make judicial override illegal. But they did not make that law retroactive, so if it is unconstitutional now, why would it not have been unconstitutional then?”
‘Governor Ivey could fix this’
A group of jurors, lawyers, judges, and activists started an online campaign this summer called We The Jury to push the issue to the top of Ivey’s desk. The campaign encourages people to contact the governor’s office, specifically her legal team, to ask for clemency in the 25 cases.
In 2016, more than 100 lawyers signed onto a similar effort aimed at then-Gov. Bentley.
“Given all of the problems surrounding Alabama’s use of the death penalty, honoring life verdicts from juries after careful deliberations would be an important step in the right direction,” said Randy Susskind, deputy director at the Equal Justice Initiative.
Sanders, an institution in Alabama politics and now in his 80s, said he’s hoping the governor will act to see all aspects of judicial override tossed out.
“She would be standing up for the jury trial, and you’re not going to have many people against the right to a jury trial. At least not publicly,” said Sanders, who left the legislature in 2018.
“I hope and pray that the spirit of fairness will touch the governor in a very special way,” he said, “and she will let the spirit of retroactivity guide her.”
Source: al.com, Ivana Hrynkiw, September 9, 2026
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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