WASHINGTON — Alabama allows judges to reject sentencing decisions from capital juries, which sounds like a sensible idea. You might want a mature and dispassionate jurist standing between a wounded community’s impulse toward vengeance and a defendant at risk of execution.

“If you didn’t have something like that,” said Judge Ferrill D. McRae, who spent 40 years on the bench in Mobile before he retired in 2006, “a jury with no experience in other cases would be making the ultimate decision, based on nothing. The judge has seen many, many cases, not just one.”

Judge McRae, chatting on the phone the other day, recalled having breakfast with Justice Thurgood Marshall at an American Bar Association meeting not long after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Justice Marshall was a fierce opponent of the death penalty. But, according to Judge McRae, the justice also saw the wisdom of the override system. “He thought it was better that someone who had seen more than one case was making the decision,” Judge McRae said.