If Shonelle Jackson’s sentence is carried out, he will be the first American to be executed despite a jury’s unanimous vote for life. Illustration By Cristiana Couceiro

On an April night in 1997, when Shonelle Jackson was eighteen, he went out to a local club in Montgomery, Alabama. As he and several friends watched a d.j. perform, a young man called Cocomo—a gang member from across town—walked up behind him and slapped him in the head, then ran off. The next day, Jackson, who had no car, approached a known thief named Antonio Barnes and asked him to steal him a ride. Jackson wanted to find Cocomo and “holler at him.”

Barnes hot-wired a Buick LeSabre, and, with Jackson driving, they picked up Barnes’s friends Poochie Williams and Scooter Rudolph. All had been drinking or smoking weed, and they were armed: Jackson had a .380-calibre handgun, Barnes had a .357, Rudolph had a 9-millimetre, and Williams had a shotgun. Cocomo could not be found, but at around 11 p.m. a small-time drug dealer named Lefrick Moore rolled past in a red Chevrolet Caprice with a booming and clearly expensive stereo system.

Jackson followed the Caprice onto a service road, sped past, and cut it off, forcing it to a stop. Guns began firing. Moore sprang from the Caprice; he was hit once, in the chest, but he attempted to run away. His friend Gerard Burdette, who was in the passenger seat, headed in the opposite direction. “No need in you running now, motherfucker!” Jackson allegedly yelled while firing his weapon.

Burdette escaped, but Moore collapsed in the street and died. Jackson and Rudolph fled in the Buick. Williams and Barnes took the Caprice, ripped out its stereo, then ditched the car in a pasture on the edge of town. After Williams showed Barnes a .380 that he said he’d found in the Caprice, they stashed their weapons in the woods and walked home. The next morning, Barnes and Jackson went to strip the vehicle, but they were run off by a farmer who had come to the pasture to feed his hogs.

Investigators had little evidence to work with: the spent casing of a single Mag Tech .380 bullet, shattered automobile glass, the fatal projectile in Moore’s heart. But two days later Barnes turned himself in, giving a “full confession,” according to a detective’s sworn affidavit, and naming Williams, Rudolph, and Jackson as accomplices. The next day, Williams and Rudolph surrendered.

The three suspects in custody identified Jackson as the sole shooter. The police went looking for him at the apartment where his mother, Marilyn, lived with his two sisters, Wanda and LaQuanda. Jackson sometimes stopped by with food or money, but mostly he stayed at Trenholm Court, a housing project on the north side of town. He had grown up there and had been reluctant to leave after his mother was evicted and moved to the west side. (“The west side got Bloods—they wear red,” Wanda told me. “On the north side, the Crips, they do blue and black. Shon affiliated with the blue and socialized with the black.”)

Jackson had started “holding” for drug dealers at Trenholm at the age of twelve. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and spent a year in juvenile lockup after helping to assault and rob a guy who, he claimed, had beat up a friend’s sister. He was currently on probation for participating in a break-in at a pawnshop. On the street, he went by Wendell—his father’s middle name. Tall and solid, with round cheeks and a bright smile, he had a deep voice and kept his hair cut low; his left forearm bore an amateur tattoo of an “S,” which his father had inked, years earlier, with a needle and thread.

Marilyn consented to an apartment search. After investigators confiscated a box of .380-calibre Mag Tech ammunition from a bedroom closet, she called Jackson and urged him to talk to the police. Together they went to the station.

It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon, and his mother says that he had been smoking marijuana. At first, Jackson denied knowing Barnes, Williams, and Rudolph. Then a detective told him that his fingerprints had been found on a Dairy Queen cup in the stolen Buick. This was a lie, but it had its intended effect: Jackson eventually admitted that he had run Moore off the road. But, he added, “I ain’t kill no one.” His account of the incident is much different: he says that gunfire flew from all directions, including from Moore’s passenger, Burdette, who started shooting after Williams fired the shotgun into the air.

All four defendants were charged with capital murder—an intentional killing accompanied by another felony. In order to secure the death penalty, the state would have to prove that the defendants had intentionally killed Moore while robbing him.

Jackson went to trial first. He knew his co-defendants in passing, but hung out with a different crowd, and insisted that they had turned on him to save themselves. (After testifying against Jackson, all three pleaded guilty to lesser offenses, with the understanding that their lives would be spared.)

The prosecutors’ case rested overwhelmingly on the co-defendants’ story. Investigators could not definitively connect the spent casing to the fatal projectile, and the only link that prosecutors could establish between the casing and the ammunition confiscated at Marilyn’s apartment was the Mag Tech brand name. (The ammo box yielded no viable fingerprints; Jackson’s mother and sisters told me it had long been in the apartment and belonged to Jackson’s father, who had been in and out of jail for years.) The state’s ballistics expert eventually testified that the lethal bullet could have been fired from three types of gun present on the night of the crime: a .380, a .357, or a 9-millimetre. Hours after the shooting, the central eyewitness—Moore’s friend Burdette—told the police that multiple people had fired guns from the Buick.

The only other principal eyewitness not facing the death penalty was a truck driver who worked at a chicken-processing plant across the road from the crime scene. After the cars collided, he saw flashes of gunfire on the driver’s side of the Buick; he heard a boom and several pops. He had observed the quickly unfolding action from inside his truck, about sixty-five yards away, on the other side of a chain-link fence. It was late at night, and the street light nearest the crime scene was out.

The D.A.’s office, possibly foreseeing the difficulty of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, offered Jackson a plea bargain: life in prison without the possibility of parole. With the death penalty on the table, he should have taken the deal. But Jackson declined.

At the time, the state carried out its death sentences with a century-old electric chair, Yellow Mama, so named because it was coated in the paint used to mark centerlines on highways. Alabama, which has since switched to lethal injection, condemns more people to death, per capita, than any other state. As Jackson went to trial, in February, 1998, nearly two hundred prisoners were awaiting execution.

The trial took place in the courtroom of William Gordon, a circuit judge in his mid-fifties who had been on the bench for two decades. Alabama elects its judges, and Gordon, a reserved and plainspoken Democrat, had spent most of his career running unopposed. He had presided over several noteworthy cases—in 1993, he banned the governor from flying the Confederate flag atop the capitol—and his colleagues told me that he was considered “brilliant” and “very fair, very scholarly.”