Please restore Jeffery Lee’s LWOP sentence

An open letter to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey

Looking back, in 2016, on his career for an article in the Selma Times-Journal, retired Alabama Judge Jack Meigs “said serving as a judge wasn’t an easy task.” He elaborated: “I didn’t feel like I was under stress while I was on the bench. After I left, I said ‘yeah,’ you really were. Twenty-five years to do something like that is a long time.” It was stressful Meigs said, because “You just have to consider the responsibility that is placed on you because you are affecting people’s lives, and I’ve always tried to take that seriously and to consider the people.”

However, in the capital case of Jeffery Lee—whose execution is scheduled for September 17—Judge Meigs did not consider the people. Because a majority of Lee’s jury, a jury who heard a molehill of mitigation evidence despite the mountain that existed, voted Lee’s life should be spared despite the terrible crimes he committed; Lee’s attorney had never handled a capital case and he never presented readily available evidence of Lee’s early abject childhood poverty (including food deprivation), his abusive childhood home, his spiraling drug addiction beginning at 8 years old huffing gasoline fumes, and an insufficiently treated traumatic brain injury Lee suffered when, on the way to high school, he was hit head-on by an 18-wheeler truck (he had to be “cut out of his car” and was unconscious for over an hour). It behooves repeating: neither the jury (or Judge Meigs) heard any of this compelling mitigation evidence, but yet the jury still decided that Lee is not the “worst of the worst” and his life should be spared.

In courtrooms all across this country the jury is the voice of the people just as it was in Lee’s case. Judge Meigs overrode a jury from Lee’s own Dallas County community supplanting their life sentence with one of death. That wasn’t right.

You know it wasn’t right because you’re the Governor that, in 2017, signed into law on your first day in office a bill to ban “judicial override”—a practice soiled by its political and racial overtones; by a cruel, insupportable illogic the legislature failed to make the law retroactive to the 25 men whose death sentences were tainted by judicial override, men like Jeffery Lee. This failure is showing itself.

Read and reread the opinion column of former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Drayton Nabers, Jr., to remind yourself about the ills of judicial override and the fallacy and sheer unfairness of not making the ban on judicial override retroactive—and how that injustice is magnified in the case of Mr. Lee.

The title of Nabers’s essay speaks for itself: “A jury voted for life, Alabama should honor that.” But the remarkable op-ed Nabers penned goes much further, explaining: “To say that the system was wrong going forward but that its past results must stand is not a principled position. It is an administrative convenience.” And too, “There is also the matter of who Jeffery is today. He spent more than twenty-six years in prison without a single violent infraction. He serves as an assistant chaplain and a leader in the Kairos ministry, providing spiritual counsel and support to other inmates.”

Please be sure to watch the documentary Lee’s legal team posted on YouTube, “Life for Jeffery Lee: The jury voted life, Alabama plans to execute him anyway.” It’s less than an hour long. Two of Lee’s jurors speak very clearly to you about how they feel about Judge Meigs overriding their voice and their judgement about Lee’s sentence. Don’t look away.

Former juror, Ms. Ozetta Thomas, says “I want the verdict that we did as a jury to give him life without parole. Because I do feel he needs to be punished for the crime that he committed. But I don’t want him to be put to death.”

Rose Ellis, another of Lee’s jurors, was even more direct with you, Governor. She says: “I think the right thing to do now, don’t give him the death sentence. Give him the life in prison like we voted on. I hope she saves him.” The “she” Rose Ellis is talking about Governor, that “she” is you. Ms. Ellis is expressly asking you to please restore Jeffery Lee’s life without parole (LWOP) sentence.

Now my space is short here like the time Mr. Lee has left unless you act. So I defy you Governor, like I defy any Alabamian and any good person anywhere whose heart is not consumed with a desire for vengeance, please watch and see if you can turn away from Mr. Lee’s family members as they movingly plead with you, Governor, toward the end of that documentary on YouTube about Jeffery Lee, begging you to spare Jeffery’s life.

Watch his mother, father, sister, brothers, and most heart-wrenchingly, his son, as they poignantly show you how much they genuinely love Jeffery—and how devastated they’ll be by his loss. Focus for a moment on his son, Jeffery Lee, Jr., a former US Army Specialist who was two-months old when his dad was arrested; he says his dad called him every day from prison before he went to school to pray with him, and his father has consistently stayed a presence—for the better—throughout his life. Understand how devastated that young man will be if Alabama executes his dad. Please don’t let judicial override and the unjust application of the death penalty in this case create more innocent victims like Lee’s son and the rest of the Lee family.