Alabama should honor decision of Lee’s jury

Jeffery Lee has been on Alabama’s death row for over two decades. He was convicted of a terrible crime — the murder of two people at a pawn shop outside Orrville in 1998. Nothing I write here is meant to minimize the gravity of those killings or the grief of the victims’ families. Those lives mattered.

But here is what also matters: Citizens from Dallas County on Jeffry Lee’s jury sat through every moment of that trial. They heard the evidence. They deliberated and voted that Jeffery Lee should spend the rest of his life in prison — not that he should be put to death.

In most states, that would have been the end of the matter. The jury decides; the judge carries out the sentence. But Alabama, at the time, had a different system. Under a practice called judicial override, a trial judge could set aside the jury’s sentencing recommendation and impose a different sentence — including death. That is precisely what happened in Jeffery Lee’s case. One elected judge rejected the recommendation of his fellow citizens and sentenced him to die.

Alabama has since recognized that this practice was wrong. In 2017, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 16, abolishing judicial override in capital cases. Gov. Kay Ivey signed it into law.

The problem is that the 2017 law was not made retroactive. And so approximately 30 people remain on Alabama’s death row today — sentenced under a system the state itself has repudiated as unjust. Jeffery Lee is one of them. If he were sentenced today under Alabama’s own law, he would not face execution. The jury’s vote for life would stand.

I am not arguing that convicted murderers are entitled to leniency. I am not suggesting that juries are always right, or that judges should be stripped of all discretion. I am saying something narrower and, I think, harder to dispute: When a state concludes that a sentencing practice was unjust — unjust enough to abolish by statute — it ought to reckon with the sentences that practice produced. To say that the system was wrong going forward but that its past results must stand is not a principled position. It is an administrative convenience.

There is also the matter of who Jeffery Lee is today. He has spent more than 26 years in prison without a single violent infraction. He serves as an assistant chaplain and a leader in the Kairos ministry, providing spiritual counsel and support to other inmates.

I do not think redemption alone is a sufficient basis for clemency in every case. But it is relevant here — because the jury that voted for life in the year 2000 did so without knowing what kind of man Jeffery Lee would become. They chose mercy based on what they knew then. The intervening decades have not undermined their judgment. They have confirmed it. The U.S. Supreme Court on June 9 prevented Alabama from executing Lee when it ruled that Alabama’s nitrogen protocol is unconstitutional, saying it represented cruel and unusual punishment. The state appealed that decision.

Gov. Ivey signed the bill that abolished judicial override. She understood, when she did so, that the practice was wrong. I would ask her to carry that understanding one step further: To recognize that Jeffery Lee’s death sentence is a product of a practice she has already helped to correct, and that she has the power — and, I would respectfully argue, the obligation — to finish the job.

A jury of Alabamians voted for life. The state of Alabama later agreed that juries, not judges, should make that call. Ivey can honor both of those judgments — the jury’s and the Legislature’s — by commuting Jeffery Lee’s sentence to life without the possibility of parole.

That is not softness on crime. That is fidelity to the conservative principles of limited government, respect for the jury system, and the rule of law.

Drayton Nabers Jr. served as the 24th chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court from 2004 to 2006. He was appointed by Gov. Bob Riley and previously clerked for Justice Hugo Black of the United States Supreme Court.