Judicial elections

This post is part of an ACSblog symposium in honor of the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. The author, Sherrilyn A. Ifill, is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law.

In his speech “Give us the Ballot,” delivered on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Martin Luther King exhorted to a crowd in Washington, D.C., “give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy.” It must have seemed in those days – before the passage of the Voting Rights Act and in the midst of fierce southern judicial opposition to the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education – that this was indeed a simple proposition. If blacks were given the right to vote and participate in elections on an equal basis with whites in the South, the elected judiciary of the South would turn away from the unjust practices against African Americans that then plagued the system.

And so as we prepare for the ceremony unveiling the monument to Martin Luther King this week, one can only imagine how Dr. King would have responded to a recent report released by the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based civil rights firm, which reveals that judges in some southern jurisdictions use their judicial override power to impose death sentences on criminal defendants for whom juries had recommended a life sentence without parole. The report is the second in a series of studies conducted by EJI that takes a close look at inequities in the justice system in the South. The first was released last year and documented the alarming and systematic exclusion of African Americans from participation in southern juries in criminal cases. In its most recent report “The Death Penalty in Alabama: Judge Override,” EJI finds that although Alabama law allows judges to override a jury’s sentence of death and impose a life sentence, judicial override is used almost exclusively (92 percent of overrides) to impose death.