Study: Elected Alabama judges give harsher sentences during election years

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published 31 March 2015

If you want to kill somebody in Alabama, try not to do it when there's an election coming up:

Statistics show that Alabama judges, who are elected to the bench, have overridden juries in murder cases 111 times since the death penalty’s reinstatement in 1976. Of that 111, judges have upgraded the sentences to death 101 times. In the remaining 10 cases, the judges downgraded the sentence to life in prison. More than 20 percent of the inmates on death row in Alabama are there as a result of judicial overrides. [...]The Alabama Criminal Defense Lawyers Association says in the 111 death-penalty upgrade decisions, 80 percent occurred in the year leading up to a judge's re-election. [Allgov]

For more background on the (relatively rare) American practice of electing judges, take a look at this segment from John Oliver on Last Week Tonight.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.