Five Facts about Alabama Prisons
From:
1. Judges override jury verdicts to get reelected. Alabama is the only state practicing Standardless Judicial Override. An Alabama Judge can sentence a convicted criminal to death even if the jury recommends another sentence, such as life without parole. In 2006, 30% of new death sentence inmates were put on death row by their trial judges after juries had ruled on life without parole. About 20% of individuals currently on death row were condemned by judicial override.
Alabama trial judges have the ability to override jury verdicts in the other directly, taking death penalty rulings and reducing them to life sentences, however this has happened only a handful of times since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Several Alabama local governments have tried to promote standards for Judicial override. These attempts have been defeated because of political pressure for local and state politicians (including elected judges) to appear “tough on crime.”
2. Excessive sentences contributed to prisons being filled to 200% capacity. The AL DOC incarcerates 30,896 individuals. The prison system is built to accommodate 13,403 prisoners. The inmate-to-staff ratio is close to 10:1, about twice the national average. That ratio applies only to the number of COs employed. In terms of the number of officers on duty at any given time, it isn’t rare to have 250-300 inmates per officer.
Since 2001, 86 new felonies have been added to the books, but the prisons’ square footage has remained static. Even Governor Bob Riley, a conservative Republican, has expressed concern about the state of Alabama’s prisons. In 1980, Alabama instituted the Habitual Felony Offender Act, which provides for lengthier sentences for habitual offenders (meaning someone convicted of one previous felony, unlike California’s “3 Strikes” law that creates a life sentence after 3 felony convictions). The sentence enhancement don’t even rely on felonies either. Sentences can be increased to excess over misdemeanor and nonviolent convictions. These sentence enhancements led Alabama to have the highest rate of life sentences in the U.S. with almost half of inmates serving 20 or more years in 2000.
3. Alabama Prisons make millions from inmate phone calls – paid for by families. A corporate telephone service pays the AL DOC a 56% commission on collect phone calls made by inmates to family members. The phone system is subject to long delays for which families of inmates pay large sums of money. In addition, the service charges connection fees and is subject to frequent cutoffs, requiring another connection fee to resume the conversation. These fees bring the DOC about $6.5 million annually.
4. Prosecutors have repeatedly – and illegally – kept minorities out of juries. If you are a minority on trial in Alabama, it’s not unlikely that you will be the only person of color in your courtroom. All of the state appellate judges are white, along with 41 out of 42 of the state’s elected district attorneys. One in three juries are all white. Since the resumption of the death penalty, 28 capital cases have been reversed because minorities were illegally excluded from juries.
5. If you can’t afford Johnny Cochran, good luck. Alabama does not have a state-wide public defender program. Of the 41 judicial circuits in the state, four have public defenders. Of those, one tries capital cases. Ten circuits contract private companies. In 72% of felony cases not a single motion is filed and in 99.4% cases experts were not requested. Most death row inmates were convicted when their attorney’s out-of-court compensation was capped at $1000, which only . ABA guidelines call for at least two attorneys in capital cases, but Alabama law only requires one. In-court compensation is paid at a rate of $60/hour and is capped at $2,000 for appeals. These low rates often lead to bad lawyering, including one case where a defense attorney come to court drunk and was ordered to sober up in jail while his client’s capital trial continued. The average time spent by juries in deliberation on capital cases was 3 hours in 1996.
Update:
Another blog post about Judicial Override can be found at Birmingham Blues