Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions has such a storied history of frowning down upon marijuana that he may have forgotten a few major details along the way.

When Sessions was asked during his confirmation hearing about his past support for imposing mandatory death sentences on people with two convictions of selling marijuana, he played clueless.

“Well, I’m not sure under what circumstances I said that,” Sessions said to the committee.

But according to Stanford University’s John Donohue and Max Schoening, Sessions is either lying or genuinely doesn’t remember a controversial bill he tried to pass while working in Alabama over 20 years ago.

In a piece published by Salon, Donohue and Schoening write:

In 1996, when serving as Alabama’s attorney general, he promoted H.B. 242, S.B. 291, a state bill to establish mandatory death sentences for a second drug trafficking conviction, including for dealing marijuana. His support for the bill was reported at the time by several local newspapers, as well as The Alabama Lawyer, the Alabama State Bar’s official publication. The Alabama Lawyer described the bill as part of a legislative package that Sessions and then-Governor Fob James proposed to “fix a broken system.”

Although the bill reportedly drew “praise from Attorney General Jeff Sessions,” it inevitably failed since the Supreme Court banned mandatory death sentences in 1987, ruling that the individual circumstances of the crime and defendant must always be considered.

Sessions’ recent bout of forgetfulness might actually be a case of lying under oath, but the authors posit that Sessions might be that much more dangerous if he actually did forget supporting death to pot dealers.

“This possible explanation is perhaps more frightening: that Sessions couldn’t recall advocating to kill drug dealers would suggest that he didn’t give much thought to backing such an extreme and unlawful policy,” writes Donohue and Schoening.