I thought I was done talking about Alabama.
Last year, I wrote a series about the carceral systems in Alabama and Texas. I spent a lot of time looking at the ways those systems operate, the people caught inside them, and the policies that can have consequences far beyond the words written in a statute.
I thought I had said what I needed to say.
Apparently, Alabama wasn’t finished with me -not after September 17, 2026.
On September 17, 2026, Alabama executed Jeffery Lee. Although convicted in 2000 of capital murder and attempted murder, Lee’s jury had voted 7–5 for life without parole. But when Lee was sentenced, Alabama law allowed a judge to override the jury’s recommendation and impose a death sentence.
And it’s worth noting that judicial override didn’t operate in a vacuum. The judges making those decisions were elected officials, in a state with a well-documented history of racial disparity in capital sentencing. The mechanism wasn’t neutral. It never was.
Alabama eventually changed that law. In 2017, the state abolished judicial override in capital cases. But the change was prospective. It did not apply to people who had already been convicted and sentenced under the old law.
And that’s how a practice Alabama no longer permits could still determine whether someone lived or died.
I understand the legal principle.
Laws have effective dates. Legislatures change statutes. Not every change in the law reaches backward and changes every case that came before it.
I understand that.
And it still pisses me off.
Because there is something unsettling about watching a system decide that a particular practice should no longer be used while people who were sentenced under that practice remain bound by its consequences.
The law changed.
The sentence didn’t.
And eventually, the sentence was carried out.
I’m not writing this to argue that every person sentenced to death is innocent. I’m not even saying that a jury’s recommendation should automatically determine the outcome of every capital case.
I’m asking a different question.
What do we do with the people who were caught by a system before we decided that system needed to change?
Because this isn’t unique to Alabama.
We talk about criminal justice reform as though changing the law necessarily changes the system.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes the law changes going forward while the consequences of the old law keep moving forward, too.
That’s one of the things that has stayed with me from studying these systems. A law can disappear from the books and still have a very real life afterward.
A policy can be abandoned and still shape someone’s future.
A practice can be declared unacceptable for the next person while remaining perfectly legal for the person who came before.
And maybe that’s why I wasn’t actually done talking about Alabama.
Because the hardest part of examining a system isn’t always identifying what is wrong with it.
Sometimes it’s sitting with what happens to the people who were already inside it when we finally decided to change it.
I don’t have a neat answer to that.
I just know that on 9/17/26, I watched a jury’s recommendation for life become a death sentence anyway.
And I thought:
We’re still not done talking about this.
