By Birmingham News editorial board
It's impossible to read the anguished pleas from Lauren Burk's loved ones -- especially her parents -- and not sympathize with their wish to see Courtney Lockhart die.
It's impossible to read the anguished pleas from Lauren Burk's loved ones -- especially her parents -- and not sympathize with their wish to see Courtney Lockhart die.
Lockhart killed Burk, an 18-year-old freshman at Auburn University, after kidnapping her from a campus parking lot three years ago in a robbery attempt. He forced her to take her clothes off, shot her in the back as she tried to escape the moving car and left her to bleed to death along a highway.
"He killed my daughter," James Burk said, "so he should die, too."
Anyone who's ever seen a loved one victimized in such a senseless manner surely can understand Burk's feelings, and anyone who hasn't been in that situation shouldn't presume to tell Burk what he ought to feel. Neither should the criminal-justice system have denied Burk's family members a forum to express those feelings. That forum came March 2, in a hearing to determine the punishment for Lockhart's crime.
In the end, Lee County Judge Jacob Walker reached the same conclusion as Burk's family. He sentenced Lockhart to death.
In our view, it was the wrong decision for a number of reasons. But we'll focus here only on 12 of those reasons: the 12 jurors who convicted Lockhart of Burk's murder but recommended, to a person, that he be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In most states, Walker wouldn't have had the option of disregarding the jury's call on this life-or-death question. Alabama is among a very few states where a judge can impose a death sentence when a jury recommends life, and it is the only state where that power has been put to such liberal use. It accounts for more than 20 percent of the people on Alabama's Death Row.
Alabama law should be changed to do away with this power, which is particularly frightening when you consider the fact our judges are elected and can feel pressure to be tough on crime. When the punishment is as serious as ending a defendant's life, the regular people who serve on the jury ought to have the final say.
In overruling the jury, Walker cited a string of robberies Lockhart had been suspected of committing around the time of Burk's murder. He said jurors hadn't been allowed to hear that evidence, and if they had, they might have reached a different conclusion.
But who can say? It may be that jurors unanimously voted to spare Lockhart's life because he is a former Army soldier who claimed he'd been mentally scarred from his time in Iraq. It may be that they had other reasons for believing death was not the appropriate sentence for this crime.
Whatever their thinking, we believe the jurors gave the judge 12 reasons not to sentence Lockhart to death -- reasons that no judge should be able to disregard.
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Alabama is the only state that allows the judge to disregard the recommendation of a "jury of one's peers" for life without parole and give death without restrictions, guidelines, or even an explanation, which is usually some variation of "I think that he deserves death." For every eight overrides for death there is only one override for life without parole. Delaware and Forida are the other two states that allow these overrides.
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