MONTGOMERY, Ala. — MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- After finding Shonelle Jackson guilty of murdering a man while stealing his car stereo, jurors recommended unanimously that the 19-year-old's life be spared.
However, trial Judge William Gordon overruled the 12-member panel. Instead of placing Jackson in prison for life without possibility of parole, Gordon ordered him to the electric chair.
Jackson is one of 83 people who have been sent to death row in Alabama in the last two decades as a result of a judicial override--a procedure that is becoming increasingly controversial in the state and around the nation.
Alabama is one of just four states that has permitted judges to ignore jury recommendations to impose death.
Judges in five other states have the sole power to make capital punishment decisions.
Later this month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on a case challenging the procedure in one of the latter states, Arizona, on the grounds that it amounts to a violation of the 6th Amendment right to be tried by a jury of peers.
If Arizona's law is toppled, legal experts say it could have an impact on the Alabama statute under the same reasoning since both laws, in essence, give judges the ultimate power to impose death.
Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Pryor says the state's law is fair because judges, having viewed capital cases in the past, have some "sense of proportionality."
Critics counter that judges should not be given unbridled authority to ignore jurors' recommendations.
Such a practice "reduces to a sham the role of the jury in sentencing and allows baseless, disparate sentencing of defendants in capital cases," Alabama Supreme Court Justice Douglas Johnstone wrote in May in a dissent in the Jackson case.
Alabama sentences more people to death per capita than any other state, and "judicial override is the single most significant factor" why, said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama. He is Jackson's appellate lawyer and plans additional appeals.
Five of the 24 people executed in Alabama since capital punishment was reinstated here in 1976 were sentenced to death by judges after juries had recommended life sentences.
The state judge who has imposed the most overrides went so far as to advertise his record on death penalty cases during his 2000 reelection campaign.
