Meanwhile, George and AB try to figure out their feelings. The jurors were reluctant to condemn a teen-ager to death, especially in a case with such conflicting evidence.

Alabama requires ten. “And what happened I know shouldn’t have happened. The judge, Robert E. Lee Key, Jr., had McMillian await trial on death row, as if a death sentence were a foregone conclusion, and relocated the trial from a county that was forty per cent black to an overwhelmingly white one. McNeill told me that he supported Gordon politically because he was a mentor and “the most honorable man I’ve about ever known.”The judges themselves often make donations to candidates who may be in a position to uphold their decisions: between 1993 and 2012, nearly forty judges who had practiced override donated money to candidates for the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, the Alabama Supreme Court, and attorney general. He then mentioned one in which three men drove around Montgomery, randomly shooting people with an assault rifle, including a woman whose brains had been “blown out.” The Judge said, “People do some terrible things.”He went on, “People talk about being hard on crime. Burdette, the key eyewitness, had disappeared, as had a recording of his interview with the police.

The police went looking for him at the apartment where his mother, Marilyn, lived with his two sisters, Wanda and LaQuanda. If Jackson’s sentence is carried out, he will be the first person to be executed despite a jury’s unanimous vote for life.“I don’t like judicial override,” Douglas Johnstone told me one afternoon in May. Nevertheless, the jury found McMillian guilty based on the testimony of three state’s witnesses, two of whom reported seeing McMillian’s truck at the dry cleaner’s around the time that Morrison was strangled and shot. Thirty-six of the nearly two hundred convicts on death row are there because of override.The potential for error in death-penalty cases is known to be so great—according to the National Academy of Sciences, one in twenty-five defendants in America will likely be wrongly convicted—that capital punishment is declining nationwide. (The current governor, Robert J. Bentley, is a Republican who strongly supports the death penalty.) Alabama, which has since switched to lethal injection, condemns more people to death, per capita, than any other state.

Since the late nineties, the number of executions has dropped by about half. Why had he factored Jackson’s juvenile record into the decision when prosecutors had been barred from using it at trial? SELMA, Ala. — The late U.S. Rep. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for the final time Sunday as remembrances continue for the civil rights icon. was sixty-five—but the judge dismissed this by suggesting that people can easily fake the condition. The jury voted, 11–1, to sentence Murry to life without parole. to be just above the threshold for mental retardation. Sure. ÉTATS-UNIS. Some death-row inmates are challenging the change in federal court.Yellow Mama remains on standby at Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, fifty miles northeast of Mobile. Gordon diminished the importance of Jackson’s youth, a mitigating factor by law, partly by commenting on his size: “At the time of the homicide, Jackson was 6 feet tall, weighed 175 pounds and was within 35 days of being 19 years old,” the Judge wrote, calling him “a physically mature adult.”In a curious turn, Gordon twice acknowledged that Jackson might not be the killer. But Jackson declined.At the time, the state carried out its death sentences with a century-old electric chair, Yellow Mama, so named because it was coated in the paint used to mark centerlines on highways. With Rachel Bilson, Jaime King, Cress Williams, Wilson Bethel. McCooey held the hearing and ruled the statement admissible.Jackson again appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, whose nine justices included Douglas Johnstone. Jackson wanted to find Cocomo and “holler at him.”Barnes hot-wired a Buick LeSabre, and, with Jackson driving, they picked up Barnes’s friends Poochie Williams and Scooter Rudolph. But you’ve got that in every aspect of the law. Hours after the shooting, the central eyewitness—Moore’s friend Burdette—told the police that multiple people had fired guns from the Buick.The only other principal eyewitness not facing the death penalty was a truck driver who worked at a chicken-processing plant across the road from the crime scene. “Your Honor, I’m very sorry for what happened,” he said.

(“The west side got Bloods—they wear red,” Wanda told me.