Chip East/Reuters

The United States Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the case of a man who was spared the death penalty by an Alabama jury only to be subsequently sentenced to death anyway by the trial judge in the case—an official who was elected to his post by the citizens of his state. The result in Woodward v. Alabama is that the state may continue to be one of only three in the nation that permits "judicial overrides" of jury decisions in capital cases.

Only two justices—Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer—dissented from the denial of certiorari, and only Justice Sotomayor was willing to lay bare the extent of the hypocrisy that accompanies the Court's resolution of this case. As she wrote, there were at least two excellent reasons why the Court should have accepted this case for review and then ended Alabama's dubious mix of law and politics in death penalty cases. That there were not five votes for either reason (0r both) reminds us how hostile this court is to reform of even the worst excesses of capital punishment in America.

Giving Elected Judges Too Much Power

The first reason why the Court should have heard Woodward and voided Alabama's sentencing scheme is substantive and doesn't require a great deal of legal training to understand. If (as Alabama has done) you give judges the power to override jury verdicts in capital cases, and if (as Alabama also has done) you then make those judges accountable to public opinion by having judicial campaigns and elections, you are going to end up (as they have in Alabama) with judges who disproportionately feel it is in their self-interest to sentence people to death even when a jury has recommended a sentence of life.