Just a quick post to note that Jefferson County (Birmingham) Alabama Judge Tracie Todd today declared Alabama’s death penalty unconstitutional, thereby barring the state from seeking the death penalty against four defendants: Eugene Billups, Stanley Chatman, Terrell McMullin, and Benjamin Acton. I have a .pdf of the entire ruling but no way at this point to link to a url. I’ll work on it. Meantime, here is a link to the AL.Com story which also contains a video of the judge, http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/03/jeffco_judge_rules_alabama_dea.html.
The ruling holds the state’s death penalty unconstitutional primarily because it permits judicial “override” of jury decisions, allowing judges to impose the death penalty even though the jury has recommended life without parole. To that extent, the ruling is an outgrowth of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Hurst v. Florida, 136 S.Ct. 616 (2016), which held that juries— not judges— must make the life or death decision in capital cases. However, the decision seems to go even farther and suggests that Alabama’s system of electing judges through highly partisan elections also contributes to the arbitrary and capricious imposition of the death penalty in violation of the 8th Amendment.
IMHO, because of the highly politicized judicial selection system the ruling warns about, the ruling is likely to last about as long as it will take for the Jefferson County District Attorney to get to the Court of Criminal Appeals. However, it is a brave and principled decision by a state court judge in a state that is not exactly famous for those qualities. More power to her.