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.”

Free at last - 27 years on Oklahoma's death row

A tale of ineffective assistance of counsel.  James Fisher (above with a lawyer from equal justice initiative) was freed today after 27 years on death row.  He twice had the wrong lawyer.  Finally courts recognized the travesty.  The first was

"E. Melvin Porter, a civil rights advocate and the first African-American elected to the Oklahoma State Senate, later said that at the time he considered homosexuals to be “among the worst people in the world,” and Mr. Fisher to be a “very hostile client.”

Mr. Porter was shockingly ill-prepared for trial — “unwilling or unable to reveal evident holes in the state’s case,” a federal appellate court later noted, yet “remarkably successful in undermining his own client’s testimony.” He exhibited “actual doubt and hostility” about his client’s defense, the court said, and failed to present a closing argument, even though the state’s case “was hardly overwhelming.”

When the time came at sentencing to plead for mercy, the court said, Mr. Porter uttered just nine words. Four were judicial pleasantries; the remaining five formed a lame objection to the prosecution’s closing argument.

With that, James Fisher, 20, was sentenced to death."

The full story by Dan Barry: This Land - In Rearview Mirror, Oklahoma and a Life on Its Death Row - NYTimes.com