And in another case, Mr. Moore dissented and said a man’s unpaid meal at a Waffle House should have led to a theft conviction, not a 35-year sentence for robbery. He called the case, which the majority voted not to review, “a serious miscarriage of justice.”

Two lawyers who worked for Mr. Moore at the Alabama Supreme Court said their boss had often empathized with defendants in criminal cases and feared they were sometimes wronged by the system. He was known as a judge who was more likely than his peers to side with a criminal defendant or civil plaintiff.

“He had no love for criminals, but he believed that every defendant was entitled to due process of law,” one of the lawyers, Matthew Clark, said in an email. “He saw many cases where the defendants, especially young black men, would be convicted solely on very weak circumstantial evidence.”

But he wasn’t liberal by any stretch.

Though Mr. Moore sometimes stood alone in criminal cases, he remained a conservative chief justice of a conservative court in a conservative state. In recent years, Mr. Moore joined in majorities that allowed the open carrying of firearms, restricted alcohol sales in some small towns and upheld the use of tax credits for private school tuition in some instances.

Douglas Inge Johnstone, a justice on the Alabama Supreme Court during Mr. Moore’s first stint there, said Mr. Moore “arrived like a bull in a china shop” and made administrative changes at the courthouse. His legal record was more nuanced, Mr. Johnstone said.

“While I opposed Judge Moore’s theocratic acts and positions, I appreciated his tendency to independent thinking in our judicial work on most of the civil cases before us,” Mr. Johnstone said in an email. “My impression was that he genuinely wanted to apply correct law to accurately distilled facts, with care not to overlook facts or law favorable to ‘the little guy,’ in most cases.”

Bobby Segall, an appellate lawyer, said in an email that Mr. Moore was “courteous and pleasant” when he appeared before him. But Mr. Segall also criticized Mr. Moore for “religion-based antics,” and said he was “appalled by his disregard” for the United States Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.