MONTGOMERY, Alabama --- Alabama is the only state where judges still override jury recommendations of life sentences to impose death sentences, National Public Radio reported Sunday.

The NPR story focuses on the case of Courtney Lockhart, convicted in the 2008 slaying of Auburn University student Lauren Burk of Marietta, Ga.

A Lee County jury recommended life without parole in the slaying, but Judge Jacob A Walker III imposed the death penalty instead.

Lockhart, an Iraq war veteran from Smiths Station, is appealing the sentence to the Alabama Supreme Court, according to the story.

According to evidence at the trial, Lockhart kidnapped Burk from a campus parking lot, forced her to undress, shot her in the back when she tried to escape from the moving vehicle and left her to die.

Defense lawyers argued that Lockhart had mental troubles caused by his combat experiences in Iraq. The judge, in imposing the death sentence, noted that Lockhart was a suspect in a string of robberies that the jury did not know about.

NPR reports that Florida and Delaware are the only two other states that still have laws on the books that allow judicial override but that they are not done in those states.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of an Alabama inmate sentenced to death over the jury's recommendation in the 2006 slaying of a Montgomery police officer.

Some critics of overrides in Alabama say it inserts politics into life-and-death decisions because judges are elected.