MONTGOMERY — Mae Puckett recalled the day she and 11 other jurors released a verdict claiming that Robin “Rocky” Myers was guilty of stabbing a Decatur, Ala., woman to death in 1993.

While she and eight other jurors believed that Myers was innocent of the crime, three others believed he was guilty and refused to switch to the majority of the jurors to avoid a hung jury.

Puckett testified before the House Judiciary Committee May 25 that the majority of the jurors felt that if the case ended in a mistrial, Myers would be retried and be sentenced to death.

“We decided since we had the power, that we could find him guilty and recommend life in prison,” a tearful and visibly nervous Puckett testified. “He seemed to be a good father. We wanted him to have a good relationship with his kids. and believe me is not easy to sit there and listen to an 8 to 10 year-old-boy crying, begging us not to kill his daddy. Especially when you know he’s not guilty of what he was accused of.”

The jury recommend life in prison, she said, after jurors cried and deliberated for hours. But weeks later, the judge enacted judicial override and sentenced Myers to death.

“When I found out the judge had overturned our recommendation I was infuriated because, why? What was the point of us even being in there if we weren’t going to matter,” Puckett said. “Why did we have to sit and listen to these horrible things? I don’t understand why we had to go through that for this (judge) to have just turned around and said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter.’”

In 2017, Alabama lawmakers approved a law that abolishes a judge’s ability to override a jury sentencing recommendation. Alabama, the last state in the nation to do so, has the highestdeath sentences per capita than any other state, according to the Equal Justice initiative.

Now, Rep. Chris England (D-District 70) is sponsoring a bill to allow Alabama prisoners who were sentenced under judicial override to be resentenced, as the 2017 law did not apply retroactivity to prisoners sentenced by judicial override.

The bill, House Bill 14, would also require a jury to be unanimous when providing an advisory verdict to a judge for a death sentence — a proposal that had been considered unsuccessfully in previous legislative sessions. Under current law, jurors in a capital murder case can advise a death sentence in a vote of 10 of 12 jurors.

“It’s always been my position that if it requires an unanimous jury to convict, that it also should require an unanimous jury to put someone to death,” England said. “If we’re going to be a state that puts people to death. It should be the absolute hardest thing that we do.”

England said requiring an unanimous jury decreases the likelihood that an innocent person would be sentenced to death — and increases the burden to take a life.

“For us, a state that says in its constitution that we value life, it’s not necessarily a life only when it’s convenient,” England said. “If your constitutional rights and your belief in humanity matter to you, you have to protect the life when it’s inconvenient as well.”

David Carpenter, presiding judge of the criminal division for 10th Circuit Court in Jefferson County, said he has 60 pending capital murder, murder or manslaughter cases that defendants are looking to appeal.

Carpenter said the lengthy appeals process costs the judicial system financially and in resources, and passage of HB 14 could help cut back on unnecessary burdens on the court system.

He added the many defendants who were sentenced to death via judicial override likely involved politics. In election years, the number of judicial overrides for death sentences increased 30 or 40 percent, he said.

“Over half of the overrides were in election years, so that tells you that there’s a political element involved here — and we can take that out,” Carpenter said in support of HB 14. “That political element affected the sentence of these 31 men who are currently on death row, and we have the opportunity to correct that.”

Toni Hall, whose mother, Faith Hall, was shot to death in 1994 by Joe Nathan James Jr., has been vocal against the death penalty before and after James’s July 2022 execution.

“I don’t think it will surprise any one of us to hear that while we hated Joe James, we could never understand why he did what he did,” Hall said. “But as more time passed, our feelings changed. Today, although we still do not understand his actions, we have learned so forgive him.”

Hall said her family pleaded with the governor, attorney general and other state leaders to stop James’s execution, calling it “another senseless killing” that caused the Hall family to relive the tragedy.

“Everyone knows a life-and-death verdict is the most important decision that a jury in our state can make,” Hall said. “It only makes sense to listen to every voice on the jury and only enact a death sentence in unanimous cases.”

HB 14 seems unlikely to pass with only five legislative days left of the Alabama Legislative session following the May 24 public hearing on the bill in a committee; The bill must be voted out of the committee, on the House floor and the Senate floor before the 30th legislative day.

Democrat Rep. Patrice McClammy implied that due to the importance of the bill, the committee should not delay a vote until the next meeting as procedure requires. She referenced the state’s 2017 bill banning judicial override should have included retroactivity.

“We’ve left five years going already with 31 individuals who may possibly have the opportunity to have life outside of prison,” McClammy said. “It just does not seem as though this bill and this public hearing would be justice, in my opinion, if we come back and say, ‘Thank you for coming. We hear all you have to say,’ …knowing that this would not be something that we will have an opportunity to go through this session.”

Committee Chair Jim Hill (R-District 50), however, was unwilling to break procedure to expedite the bill.

“We’ve always run things on a procedure. and when we get bills, we try to give the members of this committee an opportunity to consider that which we’ve done,” Hill said. “Sometimes these bills take years to work through this system.”