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exclusively use this power to turn life sentences into death sentences, although they’re also
authorized to reduce death verdicts to life if they so choose. Since 1976 , judges in Alabama
have overridden jury sentencing verdicts in capital cases 111 times. In 91 percent of these
cases, judges replaced life verdicts from juries with death sentences.
The practice has been further complicated by the increasingly competitive nature of
judicial elections in the state. Alabama elects all of its judges in highly competitive partisan
elections, one of only six states to do so (thirty-two states have some form of nonpartisan
judicial election process). The elections attract campaign contributions from business interests
seeking tort reform or from trial lawyers who want to protect large civil verdicts, but since
most voters are unschooled in these areas, the campaigns invariably focus on crime and
punishment. Each judge competes to be the toughest on crime. The people financing these
elections are largely unconcerned with whatever modest differences exist between candidates
on crime, but punishment gets the votes. Judge overrides are an incredibly potent political
tool. No judge wants to deal with attack ads that highlight the grisly details of a murder case
in which the judge failed to impose the most severe punishment. Seen in that light, it’s not
surprising that judge overrides tend to increase in election years.
We wrote a letter to the governor of Alabama, Guy Hunt, asking him to stop the Lindsey
execution on the grounds that the jury, empowered to pass judgment on him, had decided
against putting him to death. Governor Hunt quickly denied our request for clemency,
declaring that he would not “go against the wishes of the community expressed by the jury
that Mr. Lindsey be put to death,” even though we stressed that the community’s
representatives—the jury—had done the opposite; it clearly elected to spare Lindsey’s life. It
didn’t matter. As peculiar as the practice is, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld judicial override
in an earlier Florida case, which left us with no constitutional basis to block Michael Lindsey’s
execution. He was electrocuted on May 26 , 1989.
Immediately after Lindsey, we were faced with Horace Dunkins’s execution date. Once
again, we tried to help in whatever ways we could, even though time was quickly running out
and there was little hope. Mr. Dunkins suffered from intellectual disabilities, and the trial
judge found he had “mental retardation” based on his school records and earlier testing. Just
a few months before his execution was scheduled, the Supreme Court upheld the practice of
executing the “mentally retarded.” Thirteen years later, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Court
recognized that executing people with intellectual disabilities is cruel and unusual
punishment and banned the practice as unconstitutional. For many condemned and disabled
people like Horace Dunkins, the ban came too late.
The Dunkins family called frequently, trying to figure out what could be done with only
days to go before his execution, but there were very few options. When it became clear there
was no way to stop the execution, the family turned their attention to what would happen to
Mr. Dunkins’s body after his death. They seemed particularly concerned, for religious reasons,
with preventing the state from performing an autopsy on their son’s body. The date of the
execution arrived, and Horace Dunkins was killed in a botched execution that made national
news. Correctional officials had plugged the electrodes into the chair incorrectly, so only a
partial electrical charge was delivered to Mr. Dunkins’s body when the electric chair was
activated. After several agonizing minutes, the chair was turned off but Mr. Dunkins was still
alive, unconscious but breathing. Officials waited several more minutes “for the body to cool”