Overriding the Jury in Capital Cases - NYTimes.com

Alabama death chamber

Hanging judges - you've got them in Alabama, according to this new report from the Equal Justice Initiative. As Adam Liptak explains, 20% of those on death row in Alabama are there because a judge overrode the jury's rejection of the death penalty.

One point of privilege: few trial judges have seen "many, many" capital cases. If you want accumulated  experience you should support the rigorous proportionality review for which the New Jersey Supreme Court set the gold standard, as demonstrated in the proceedings of the 2008 symposium Legislation, Litigation, Reflection & Repeal, the Legislative Repeal of the Death Penalty in New Jersey.

Overriding the Jury in Capital Cases - NYTimes.com: 

"WASHINGTON — Alabama allows judges to reject sentencing decisions from capital juries, which sounds like a sensible idea. You might want a mature and dispassionate jurist standing between a wounded community’s impulse toward vengeance and a defendant at risk of execution.
“If you didn’t have something like that,” said Judge Ferrill D. McRae, who spent 40 years on the bench in Mobile before he retired in 2006, “a jury with no experience in other cases would be making the ultimate decision, based on nothing. The judge has seen many, many cases, not just one.”