Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Friday commuted the death sentence of Robin “Rocky” Myers to life in prison without parole, citing considerable questions about his guilt.
Mr. Myers, 63, was convicted of capital murder in the 1991 stabbing of his neighbor, Ludie Mae Tucker, in Decatur, Alabama. He has long maintained that he is innocent.
The State’s case at trial relied on witnesses who gave false and conflicting testimony. Witnesses changed their stories multiple times, as Mr. Myers’s counsel explained in their request for clemency, and at least one witness admitted after trial that he lied on the stand after he was pressured by police.
Ms. Tucker had met Mr. Myers several times, but she did not name him or identify a neighbor as her attacker when she spoke to police before she died. As a juror later recounted, “She described the man who stabbed her. She said he was a stocky black man in a light-colored shirt. She didn’t say ‘it was my neighbor Rocky,’ even though she knew him.”
No forensic evidence ties Mr. Myers to the crime. As Gov. Ivey noted, no murder weapon was found, no fingerprint evidence was linked to Mr. Myers, and no DNA evidence or other physical evidence connected him to the scene.
After the attorney general’s office filed a motion seeking Mr. Myers’s execution, the Alabama Supreme Court granted the motion last week and authorized the governor to schedule an execution.
The governor instead commuted his sentence, saying in a statement that there was “circumstantial evidence” against Mr. Myers, but it is “riddled with conflicting evidence from seemingly everyone involved.”
“In short, I am not convinced that Mr. Myers is innocent, but I am not so convinced of his guilt as to approve of his execution,” the governor said. “I therefore must respect both the jury’s decision to convict him and its recommendation that he be sentenced to life without parole.”
“I pray that the Tucker family may, in some way, find closure and peace knowing this case is closed,” she added.
This is the first time Gov. Ivey has stopped an execution since taking office in 2017, and the first time in 25 years that an Alabama governor has commuted a death sentence.
A Compromise Verdict, Betrayed
At his 1994 trial, the overwhelmingly white jury rejected the death penalty for Mr. Myers and voted 9-3 that he should be sentenced to life in prison. Under an arbitrary and disfavored practice that is now illegal, the trial judge overrode the jury’s verdict and condemned Mr. Myers to death.
Alabama abolished judge override in 2017, but the State is still pushing to execute people whose juries voted for a life sentence. Last year, Alabama executed Kenny Smith even though his jury voted 11-1 for a life sentence. Nearly 20% of the people who are condemned to death in Alabama received life verdicts from their juries.
The governor noted that her commutation reinstated the life sentence that jurors had recommended.
“God is answering prayers,” juror Mae Puckett told AP. “Governor Ivey put it back into the jury’s hands.” Ms. Puckett was a member of the Morgan County jury that convicted Mr. Myers.
She urged the governor to spare Mr. Myers’s life, writing in a recent op-ed, “I believed then, and I believe now, that Mr. Myers is innocent.”
She wrote that she and other jurors who did not believe Mr. Myers was guilty reached a compromise deal to convict him and return a life sentence. “I left the courthouse feeling like that compromise saved Mr. Myers’s life,” she wrote, adding that the judge’s override of their verdict was unjust. “Seeing [the override] happen in Mr. Myers’s case was a betrayal of the care we jurors put into considering his fate.”
Lawyers from the Federal Defender Program of the Middle District of Alabama, who represent Mr. Myers, have argued for years that there were multiple failures in the case against Mr. Myers, who is intellectually disabled.
Mr. Myers, who is Black, was represented at trial by a lawyer with ties to the Ku Klux Klan and convicted by a jury comprised of 11 white people and one Black person.
During his appeals, he was abandoned by his counsel and missed a critical deadline, which prevented him from receiving full consideration of his claims in federal court.
“As evidence accumulated of his innocence and the many injustices he experienced over the course of his case,” his counsel wrote there has always been “hope that he would someday see some measure of justice, of mercy, of humanity.”