The Alabama Murders - Part 3: A Peculiar Institution

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Hello, hello, Malcolm here.

Before we get to the episode, I want to let you know you can get this entire season now, ad-free, by subscribing to Revisionist History on Pushkin Plus.

Sign up on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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Previously on revisionist history.

35 years.

That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur.

He backhanded his child.

I don't know what the child had done.

You just don't do that to a child across its face.

35 long

years.

And I answered the call and I got all the information on who done it, who was all involved, and all the particulars.

The viciousness was there that he could do something like that.

I don't know.

When Elizabeth Sennett was murdered, Patterson Hood, one of the lead singers of the legendary southern rock band The Drive By Truckers, was living in the Shoals.

Obviously, it was the big front page story for, you know, weeks because it was such a horrific, grisly murder.

And all of the different, as more details started coming out about it, you know, it just kept getting worse and worse.

He was 24, working at a pharmacy in Florence, looking for a way out.

They closed the Ford plant.

in 1982, which was the year I graduated from high school.

And when it was gone, not only was it gone, but then all these other businesses that depended on people who made the money working at the Ford plant, that stuff started going.

It's really bounced back in the last

15, 20 years.

The town's almost unrecognizable because of all the really positive things that have happened.

But in 88, it was pretty fucking grim.

Years went by, and the story of what happened to Elizabeth Sennett stayed with him.

I don't know why it resonated with me, but I first started writing it, thinking in terms of writing it more as like a

short story or a book or something like that.

And I kind of wrote it in that form and then at some point started turning it into a song.

The song was called The Fireplace Poker.

He released it on the album Go-Go Boots, which came out in 2011.

Maybe you've heard it before.

Patterson Hood got his inspiration from what one of the regulars in that Florence drugstore, a local police officer, told him back in 1988.

He was the chief of police in Florence, and so he was all up in

any police business anywhere in the area, whether it was in his jurisdiction or or not.

So he would come in and just talk about stuff.

And it was interesting to hear, for sure.

He theorized really early on that it wasn't like

it was supposed to be looking like it was.

What everyone first thought was that Elizabeth Sennett had been murdered by two local kids, Kenny Smith and John Forrest Parker.

They were the ones who drove out to Coondog Cemetery Road on that March morning.

It was Parker's knife found in a pond behind the house.

They confessed.

They were charged with capital murder.

Everything that would happen in the Senate case over the course of the next 35 years, the controversies, the outrage, the moral calamity that would ultimately take place in Holman prison, was based on the assumption that the justice system in Alabama had correctly determined who was responsible for what happened that morning.

Namely, Charles Sennett was the mastermind who ordered the hit on his wife, and Parker and Smith were the killers.

But that's not what the Florence police chief told Patterson Hood.

Life was falling from her grasp, but still

she lay there trying.

No one will ever know what she told him.

Or know what he told her.

Cause the river ended his wife in

15 blacks with fireplace poker.

The Reverend came home from work and found the missus dying.

Life was falling from her grasp, but still she lay there trying.

No one will ever know what she told told him or know what he told her because the Reverend did his wife in.

15 wax, fireplace poker.

Wait,

the reverend did his wife in?

My name is Malcolm Globwell.

You're listening to my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This episode of the Alabama Murders is about the trial of John Forrest Parker, one of the three young men charged in the killing of Elizabeth Sennett, and all of the ways that the catastrophe that unfolded in the Shoals, the failure cascades set in motion by the murder, could have been averted.

The counterfactual version of events, the what-ifs.

Episode 3: A Peculiar Institution.

I've had, you know, other cases that

technically were probably factually more

complex, but

this is, you know, this is the one that I will

is still on my mind, even without child coming.

Tom Heflin was John Forrest Parker's attorney.

He remembers exactly where he was the day Elizabeth Sennett was murdered.

I had been to Red Bay, Alabama, which is on the Mississippi border, down the same highway where this happened.

I may well have seen

John Forrest Parker and Kenny Smith in their car.

I don't know that for a fact, but I may well have.

Then I got the call.

that the court was going to appoint me and Gene Hanby to represent him.

Heflin is the son of the former U.S.

Senator from Alabama, Alabama, Howell Heflin.

In his living room, Heflin has a portrait of his famous father, and father and son look very much alike.

The Heflins have large leonine heads and a kind of rumbling southern gravitas.

So you were court-appointed attorneys.

Court-appointed attorneys.

Yeah, yeah.

How much of your practice would have been that kind of work in those days?

Zero.

This is unusual.

So why,

how did it come about then?

I think we'd had a string of capital murder cases, and,

you know, everybody kind of is expected to serve.

Parker's trial took place in May of 1989 at the Colbert County Courthouse, a graceful white neoclassical building on the town square in the center of Tuscumbia.

All right, we're at the Colbert County Courthouse.

If we look across,

you see a three-story

building with a razor wire around it and a fence.

That's the county jail.

Heflin gave my colleague Ben Dadaf Hafrey a tour of the courthouse.

Well we don't have full lights.

The courtroom was small, gray and white.

On the wall, there's a portrait of the judge in the Parker case, Inga Johnson.

Long blonde hair, blue eyes.

So where did you guys sit?

There.

And so the jury box, that's interesting.

It sort of faces the judge.

Jury box is there.

Witness would be there.

Court clerk over there.

Obviously, judge, court reporter here.

Like, some of the jurors would have had, like, a direct view of John, like from feet away.

Yeah, he would have been probably, we probably would have sat him there.

I think we did.

Well, because inside where we block him off to a certain extent.

Why do you want to block him off?

Well, he is shackled.

Yeah.

You know,

that's basically, I just don't want to emphasize that he is a prisoner at that point.

Even everybody knows he is.

Most criminal trials, particularly older ones, don't have an audio or video record.

There's just a transcript created by the court reporter.

The transcripts can run for thousands of pages, and they're their own unique literary form.

Because there's no description or elaboration or context, they read as flat, banal.

It takes a little bit of time to learn how to use your imagination to fill in the empty spaces.

And in the case of John Parker, what becomes clear when you learn how to fill in those empty spaces is that the prosecution's case was really, really

weak.

The state's problem started with Parker sitting there in the docket a few feet from the jurors.

This was a case about a murder for hire, a contract killer, and he just didn't look the part of a contract killer.

Tell us about Parker.

Parker was like 18,

actually a good family,

solid people.

He had had

some prior childhood trauma that I think probably created a little mental...

He had some drug problems.

Tell me more about your impressions of him.

A kid who had been drugged out and didn't know what they were doing?

John Forrest Parker had been arrested on multiple occasions for minor crimes, breaking into cars, stealing gas.

He'd failed ninth grade three times.

In one of his psychiatric evaluations done after one of his previous arrests, there's this, quote, John's childhood history includes a brain concussion at the age of two.

He reportedly was unconscious for 36 hours following his concussion.

His parents reported that due to his brain concussion, they had not expected very much of John.

On the drive to Koondark Cemetery Road on the morning of Elizabeth Sennett's murder, Parker and Smith had a bottle of whiskey between them on the front seat.

Parker injected himself with a healthy dose of opioids on the way over.

Charles Sennett gave them some money to buy a gun.

They used it to buy drugs instead.

In every description of the crime, they come across as completely clueless.

Parker is 19, Smith 22.

They're so lackadaisical that after beating and stabbing Elizabeth Sennett, they threw the knife and the walking stick they used into the pond behind her house, when there are literally thousands of acres of wooded wilderness on the drive back home where something could be thrown away and it would never, ever be found.

Yes, Parker and Smith hurt Elizabeth Sennett badly and took money to commit acts of violence.

But when we hear the phrase contract killers, we think of assassins.

Mafia hitman, stone-cold, hard-bitten, lethal.

These were screwed-up kids.

One of the biggest points of weakness for the prosecution emerged in the testimony of the surgeon who was on duty at Helen Keller Hospital when Elizabeth Sennett was brought into the ER, David Parks McKinley.

He was the one who first saw her injuries, who tried to save her life, who pronounced her dead.

The direct examination by the prosecutor is brief and to the point.

The police had found a knife, a hunting knife, in the pond behind the Senate House.

This was a knife that both Smith and Parker admitted to bringing with them to Koondog Cemetery Road.

The prosecution just wanted to establish the connection between that knife and Elizabeth Sennett's death.

Question.

Doctor, can you tell us what you recall about her physical appearance?

Answer.

The most striking thing was multiple stab wounds, particularly over the right side of the chest and at the base of the neck.

There were also some wounds of the forehead and scalp.

McKinley testified that the cuts on the forehead and scalp looked like they were from a blunt object.

The wounds to the chest and neck were caused by a knife.

He went on to say, it is is likely that the chest wounds were by and large the cause of her death.

Prosecutor, thank you, doctor.

That's all.

Haflin knew the prosecution was calling McKinley, so he did a little homework beforehand.

We're starting trial on the Tuesday following Memorial Day.

I know they're calling

The state medical examiner was coming up to testify what the fatal wounds were, describing them.

Then they were bringing the doctor who treated her at the emergency room there.

And I called up the doctor and said, what are you going to say tomorrow?

And we talked about it and visited, kind of knew each other.

What the doctor told him made Heflin realize he could lay a trap.

So in court, Heflin gets up and in cross-examination asks McKinley about the knife.

Question, have you ever been shown the knife that the state removed from the pond in this case?

Answer.

I have not seen it, no, sir.

Heflin turns to the prosecutors.

Do y'all have the knife?

This is one of those moments when the transcript is of little help.

You have to fill in the empty space.

The prosecutors are anxious.

They thought the identity of the murder weapon was a settled fact.

So why does Heflin want McKinley to see it?

They hesitate.

The judge immediately intervenes.

Can I see y'all at the bench?

Both sides huddle with the judge.

The judge says to Heflin, do you just want to show him the knife?

Heflin says, uh-huh.

The judge turns to the prosecutor.

Why don't you get it?

More hesitation from the prosecutors.

The judge repeats herself.

Y'all go get it.

The prosecutors rummage in their evidence box, take it out.

Heflin hands it to the doctor.

I asked Heflin to read aloud from the trial transcripts from the crucial moment of his exchange with McKinley.

You saw the wounds inflicted on Miss Spennett Fresh when she came into the hospital, didn't you?

Yes, sir, I said.

Examining that knife, do you have any opinion whether or not that was the instrument that could have inflicted those wounds?

And McKinley answers simply.

I would frankly be surprised this was the knife based on what I saw or the sharp project based on what I saw on the patient.

I don't have any further questions.

The government's own witness testifies that the alleged murder weapon isn't actually the murder weapon.

The chest wounds are of a much smaller knife.

Yes.

The neck wounds

are consistent with the large knife that Kenny and John have.

The chest wounds, which are the fatal wounds, seem to be made by a smaller knife, and we can't find the smaller knife.

That's right.

From there, you would think, the reasonable reasonable doubts grow.

Were Kenny, Smith, and John Parker actually the ones who stabbed Elizabeth Sennett to death?

The pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Elizabeth Sennett's body testifies.

She described Sennett's chest wounds as rapidly fatal.

When asked about this by prosecutors, she said bluntly, I don't think she lived very long after those wounds were inflicted.

Once again, one of the government's own witnesses undermines their case.

Think about the timing.

At 11.44 in the morning, Charles Sennett calls Ronnie Mae in hysterics to report that his wife has been attacked.

At 12.15, the paramedics discover that Elizabeth Sennett has a pulse.

At 1 p.m., she arrives at Helen Keller Hospital, and she's still alive.

McKinley, in fact, doesn't pronounce her as dead until 2.05.

a full hour later.

But according to the prosecution's own witness, John John Parker and Kenny Smith were back home in Florence by 11:30 that morning.

It's a 30 to 40-minute drive from Koondag Cemetery Road to Florence, and it's pouring rain outside.

The timing doesn't work.

They must have left the sentence house by at least 11.

There's no way Parker and Smith could have inflicted rapidly fatal wounds at mid-morning if she was still alive at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

Meaning, Smith and Parker must have been long gone by the time the fatal wounds were inflicted.

Later in the trial, another pathologist who had examined the Sennett autopsy made the same point.

Here is Heflin questioning him.

Question.

If the evidence in this case shows that the Cherokee Rescue Squad detected a heartbeat on Mrs.

Sennett at approximately 12.15 p.m.

on March the 18, 1988, Based upon your years of experience as a pathologist and your review of the exhibits that you just named, do you have an opinion as to what time prior to 12.15 p.m.

the fatal wounds were delivered?

Answer, within a very few minutes.

The judge, the jury, the lawyers on both sides, the journalists covering the trial are all listening to this testimony with its unmistakable implication.

Someone else must have stabbed Elizabeth Sennett in the chest with a smaller knife.

And who was the only person at the house at the time of the 911 call?

Charles Sennett.

If Sennett does it, the timing makes a lot more sense.

He shows up after they've left.

Stabs, calls.

Stabs and calls.

Yeah.

Poor even had called and then stabbed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A knife that doesn't fit, a timeline that makes no sense.

And if the jury still had any lingering doubts about Charles Sennett's culpability, there was also what they heard from Elizabeth Sennett's friend, who had a front row seat to the inner life of her marriage.

That's after the break.

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Susan Mosley was a nurse at a weight loss clinic in Muscle Schoals.

Elizabeth Sennett was one of her patients.

And I noticed

she was extremely quiet, introverted,

no self-esteem,

but was a brilliant brilliant woman mosley sat down with a local reporter named lee hedgebeth who has written about the senate case and did some interviews for us she shared with him what she remembered about elizabeth in the months leading up to the murder so she would come once a week to the clinic and i would go over

i would weigh her to her blood pressure talk to her about, okay, how's your weight doing?

Mosley said that Elizabeth Sennett didn't seem happy.

She would sit in the waiting room with a napkin crushed in her fist.

One day, Mosey decided to confront her.

And I said, Liz, now listen to me.

You've been going up and down your weight.

So

I'm going to close this chart.

And I'm just going to turn around.

I'm going to shut my eyes.

Like a new way I can.

How about you?

You can close your eyes

and just tell me

what you think

is the biggest problem if you eat potato chips like I do every night we'll get baked ones and we will do something so just let me know and I heard I nearly opened my eyes and I heard the chair rustle and I still kept it shut

and she said

I need a dog

open your eyes She said, turn around here.

And I'll never forget, I turned to my left.

I phoned around

like this and she was standing there and I'm gonna tell you before we go any further I'm gonna

she got buttoned her blouse

at 40 pounds

by about an inch

with a short sleeve would come

all in her chest

in her back

her butts and legs to a certain area where a skirt would come

was black

black

this senate was covered in bruises

i got up and had this hole but i didn't ask no questions i didn't ask anything

i had to button her little thing back up and now going like that and she sat down

Do you want to talk about this?

And she began to tell me this story

about her relationship

with Mr.

Simmon.

She began to tell me

that

she

didn't know how, but that he was going to kill her.

And that she knew this.

And she had been saving her money.

for the balls

and the raid of the attorney she was going to is going to charge her $400.

She said, I've worried about this.

You worried about this response.

I'll do this.

He was going to say shit.

She said, I know.

I don't think I'll ever be clear with me before he kills me.

She didn't know how, but he was going to kill her.

And she didn't think she could break free.

Mosie said she tried to help Elizabeth to find a way to leave Charles, leave the marriage.

She told Elizabeth, you can come and live with me if you want.

She tried to help her find the words to communicate to her husband it had to end.

We would sit there and I would lit me right off off the jailplay and say, okay, now,

say this.

Charles, we need to talk.

I cannot continue to be

working with all these beatons and then go to church on Sunday and England and try to kill girlfriends, wear a long-sleeve shirt

and 100 degrees out.

Somebody is going to figure this out.

I can't continue to do this.

Mosley gave a deposition to investigators, and her testimony was recounted to the jury by by Ronnie May from the Colbert County Sheriff's Office in the flat, effectless tone of Official Speak.

But even then, it's impossible to miss the power of what she saw.

Listen, this is what May said.

Mrs.

Mosley said that she had been told by Mrs.

Sennett that around Christmas of that year, Charles' family came to visit and they had come up from Florida.

Mrs.

Sennett stated that some of the family went hunting.

She stated that Charles became extremely upset over some conversation between he and members of the family and Mrs.

Sennett stated that during that outburst at Christmas with his family members, he laid down on the floor and screamed and cried and seemed to be paralyzed at different times.

Mrs.

Sennett stated that this went on for some time at the house and as a result, Charles's family left and returned to Florida.

Mrs.

Mosley stated that Mrs.

Sennett told her during this argument that Charles at one point had pulled pulled and waved a gun in the direction of his father.

On one of my visits to the Shoals, I sat in Tom Heflin's living room and tried to make sense of all the things the jury learned about Charles Sennett, who had taken his own life so quickly after his wife's murder.

I mean, of all of these three potential murderers, Parker, Smith, and Sennett, Sennett is the only one with a documented history of

violent, highly aggressive behavior.

He's the one who beat his wife.

To me, this is all about Charles Sennett, the whole thing.

He sets the whole thing in motion.

He's the charismatic, persuasive adult.

He's a predator.

He really should be the one on trial.

And

without having gone back, maybe we didn't try him hard enough.

This, I think, is is what was on the police chief's mind when he gossiped about the case with Patterson Hood, lead singer at the Drive-By Truckers, at that drugstore in Florence.

I can't remember how soon they figured out that he, that, you know, the preacher had finished the job and all that, but it was, you know, it was pretty obvious, pretty quick, you know, that those guys,

they were fuck-ups.

They took what was going to be a simple go-in,

you know, killer, make it look like a robbery, and turned it into this gruesome thing,

and she was still alive.

And so the preacher did what, you know, he then did.

And

I mean, it's, God, it's just such an awful story on every imaginable level.

Which is why Patterson Hood wrote the crucial verse.

Life was falling from her grasp, but still she lay there trying.

No one will ever know what she told,

or know what he told her.

Cause forever

ended his wife and

15 wax

fireplace poker.

To read the John Parker trial transcript with the full knowledge of what would happen over the following decades is to get angry, especially after what happened next.

The sentencing.

The Olympic Games have come a long way since the first one in 776 BC.

In fact, those Olympic Games weren't even games.

It was the Olympic game, as there was only one race, a straight 630-foot sprint.

By 67 AD, chariot racing had become a big event, so big that the Emperor Nero competed.

And even though he was thrown from his chariot and couldn't finish, he was nonetheless declared the winner.

It's good to be king.

One thing that hasn't changed is the importance of quality sleep to an athlete's performance, which is why SATFA is so proud to have been named the official mattress and restorative sleep provider for the U.S.

Olympic and Para-Olympic teams.

No one knows more about restorative sleep than Satfa.

Each one of their mattresses is designed to provide the kind of sleep elite athletes need to perform at their peak.

Of course, you don't have to be an elite athlete to benefit from sleeping well.

Being human is the only requirement.

Visit SAFA.com slash Gladwell to save up to $200 on a $1,000 or more purchase.

That's S-A-A-T-V-A.com slash Gladwell.

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What was it like when you were sequestered?

We spent eight days over here in the Ramada Inn.

Gary Highfield, foreman of the jury in the Parker trial, talking to my colleague Ben Nadaf Hafrey.

It was good.

I mean, you know, they fed us.

And I mean, we got to go home and get clothes and all that kind of stuff and then, you know,

go down there.

But

they told us to prepare for clothes for a week.

And we got them and, you know, went to the hotel.

I mean, it was all good.

Did you guys hang out when you were segregated?

We really, they told us not to, you know, we just kind of, we did get to go to the pool.

We did go to the pool one day.

Highfield was 30 years old at the time, married, one kid, another on the way, sold insurance.

He says, looking back, that the news coverage of the killing made the job of the defense very difficult.

I think it kind of handcuffed them

because

people had

an idea of what had happened.

There was so much put out there

beforehand.

And

when a person gets something in their mind,

you know,

it's kind of hard to change.

So when they heard all of the discrepancies about the timing and the weapon and the character of Charles Sennett, it was hard for them to square that with their understanding of John Parker.

He had agreed to go out to Koondog Cemetery Road.

He had admitted he brutally assaulted Elizabeth Sennett.

A dispassionate reading of the trial transcripts today,

years later, supports the idea that Parker should have been acquitted of the murder charge, just gotten something like conspiracy to commit murder or assault in the first degree.

But this was a year after the crime, and it was very hard to be dispassionate.

But, I mean,

look

in that kind of situation,

if you have,

he meant to kill her with that pipe.

I mean, if you mean to do something, you may not actually be the one that committed the death, the actual death, but torturing somebody that bad was, man,

it was awful, dude.

Even if you're not the one that talked, that was the one that fatally killed her,

you did.

I mean, it was proven that you did every bit of that stuff to this lady.

I mean, she might as well have been dead, but anyway,

I don't know.

It's just,

I mean,

I don't even like to think about it too much.

I don't know which one of them killed her.

I really don't.

But I think both of them got what they probably deserved

legally

and morally.

They found Parker guilty of murder.

So Parker's attorney, Tom Heflin, lost that round.

But the prosecution was asking for the death penalty, and here the jury hesitated.

The picture that Heflin had painted of his client as a mixed-up kid in over his head had left an impression.

So the jury voted overwhelmingly 10 to 2 for life without parole.

The jury didn't think Parker deserved to die.

I just don't think some of these people that were on the jury, they didn't want that to be on their conscience

the rest of their life, putting somebody into the death penalty.

At this point, the cascade could have stopped, right?

A cascade is unique as a category of catastrophe because it requires multiple stages in sequence.

Remember our proverb from episode one, you need the nail, the shoe, the horse, the rider, the message, and the battle for the kingdom to be imperiled.

And if any of those stages fall out along the way, if the rider loses his horse but quickly finds another, the kingdom is fine.

A life sentence for Parker brings the whole saga to a close because it means that Kenny Smith would almost certainly get a life sentence as well when his time came.

And for all intents and purposes, the case would be closed.

Justice would be served, the rider found another horse, the kingdom is just fine.

Except, that's not what happens.

Why?

Because this is Alabama.

To understand what happens next requires a brief digression.

into an obscure legal doctrine known as judicial override.

Judicial override arose in the mid-1970s in response to the Supreme Court's insistence that states be more rigorous in the way they use the death penalty.

The court wanted standards, rules.

So the court divided capital cases into two stages.

First, a jury was required to rule on the defendant's guilt.

Then, the Supreme Court said it wanted juries to do something they don't do in normal criminal cases.

Decide on the appropriate sentence.

Alabama's response was to pass a law giving the final word word to the judge.

And if the judge wanted to override the jury's decision to turn, say, life without parole into the death penalty, they could.

A handful of states did something similar, like Florida.

But in Florida, the law said that the judge had to give, quote, great weight to the jury's decision.

In Alabama, a judge could do whatever they wanted.

And over the next 40 years, judges did just that.

The override was used over a hundred times in Alabama, almost always to allow a judge to execute someone whose life the jury wanted to save, with judges saying all kinds of crazy things along the way, like the time an Alabama jury went easy on a murderer because he was mentally disabled, and the judge overrode them because, and I'm quoting, the sociological literature suggests gypsies intentionally test low on standard IQ tests.

So, in the Parker trial, the jury rules in the first stage that he's guilty, and in the sentencing stage they say no death penalty, life without parole.

And what happens next?

The judge, Inga Johnson, the one with the portrait on the wall in the courtroom, overrides the jury recommendation and sentences Parker to death.

Heflin was not exactly surprised.

When you heard...

her override decision, your reaction was

you saw it coming.

Saw it coming.

Yeah.

Do you, um, did she?

I think she, I think she, now, she's generally a good judge.

I don't know.

I think she listened.

I think she,

again, I'm not saying she had totally prejudged it, but

I think she,

you know, it

she doesn't give in her sentencing decision.

She doesn't really give specific reasons as to why she's overriding the jury's recommendation.

In Alabama, you're not required to.

The whole thing makes no sense, of course.

If the Supreme Court wanted the states to make the application of the death penalty less arbitrary, how does just handing over power to judges to do whatever they want for whatever random reason fix the problem?

Gary Highfield, the jury foreman, is still angry about it.

What reason did I have to to spend a week, over a week,

in a jury listening to this when she has the right to overturn my decision?

Our decision?

Yeah.

I mean, I felt like it was no reason for me to even be there.

That's the problem I have with,

that's the only problem I have with the whole thing.

I don't, I mean, I just felt, I felt useless spending all that time on a jury and then

she has the right to come back.

I mean there's no sense in even having a jury if you if you're going to be able to overturn the jury, if a judge can overturn the jury.

Parker gets sent to death row at Donaldson Prison in Bessemer, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham.

This is 1989.

His lawyers keep him alive, filing appeal after appeal.

13 years pass.

He's still alive, and he gets one final chance, by way of a new Supreme Court case.

In Ring v.

Arizona, the court throws out Arizona's practice of allowing judges to make sentencing decisions independently of the jury in death penalty cases.

They said it violates the Sixth Amendment, which reads, in case you've forgotten, in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.

If your life is at stake, then what happens to you shouldn't be left left up to the whims of whatever judge you were assigned.

Only a jury should be allowed to make the call of life or death, and that protection is right there in the Constitution.

In response, Indiana, which had an override statute on its books, shuts it down.

Everyone on death row in Indiana who was there because of a judge's override gets their original life sentence back.

All eyes turned to Alabama.

Surely they have to follow suit, right?

John Parker's going to live.

When I heard that it was done,

my feeling was John was off death row.

This was 2002.

For the next eight years, Parker got up every morning waiting for the state of Alabama to acknowledge the fact that the law that put him on death row was unconstitutional.

He waits and waits.

Do you know when Alabama finally got around to abolishing judicial override?

2017, when it was too late to make any difference for Parker.

In fact, it took Alabama 41 years to come to their senses.

And even then, they couldn't help themselves.

They say this reversal only applies to future cases.

Anyone who's already on death row because of a judge's override in the previous 42 years stays on death row.

In the years before the Civil War, There was a phrase southern slave owners would use to describe their practice of owning their workforce.

They They called it their peculiar institution.

A euphemism.

A nice way of saying that things were done a little differently in their part of the world.

Judicial override is, I think,

a very good example of another Alabama peculiarity.

And if you are at all curious about how this particular peculiarity works, I would direct you to the discussion that took place on April 17th, 2024, in a hearing room at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.

Hey, ladies and gentlemen, I want to welcome you to the House Judiciary Committee.

We're glad to have each and every one of you here with us today.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Mr.

England, you want to talk about 27?

Absolutely.

Representative England is Chris England.

That rarest of species in Alabama, a Democrat, represents Tuscaloosa.

He was the co-sponsor of the legislation back in 2017 that ended judicial override.

Now he wants to make an amendment to that law, House Bill 27.

What this bill does or seeks to do is to

make that application retroactive so that I believe 33 individuals that are currently sitting on death roll as a result of override

could be re-sentenced.

Representative England says, we've all finally agreed that judicial override violates the constitutional right to a jury trial in death penalty cases.

So we should go back and restore the jury's decision in the case of all those people who are only on death row because it took us 40 years to realize that back in 1975 we made a big mistake.

Mr.

England, I hear what you're saying, and I understand that an individual tried today would be subject to a different set of laws.

And I've got you, but the individuals that were tried prior to the time we changed the law were subject to those

laws that were in effect at that time.

And the law that was in effect at that time allowed judicial override and these judges in their discretion overrode.

Then comes this priceless bit of nonsense.

Consequently, it's very difficult for me to

second guess or in effect override that which the judge overrode.

At this, there are lots of nods up and down the committee.

This is is the Alabama peculiarity.

I have southern friends who get mad, correctly, at the way northerners always bring up slavery, or get all worked up because people drive around with Confederate flags.

But come on.

This isn't a random thing.

This is a characteristic.

There is something in the psyche of places like Alabama that really, really, really doesn't want to address the consequences of past moral failures.

Aye.

Is there a motion to give this bill a favorable report?

report?

Thank you.

And a second.

Okay, I think we've had plenty of discussion.

You asked for a roll call.

Go ahead, Brandy.

Maybe you see where this is going.

They vote it down.

There will be no overriding of the override.

It seems really clear to me that John Forrest Parker didn't kill Elizabeth Sennett.

He was back home in Florence when she received the stab wounds that killed her.

He should never have been convicted of murder, but he was.

And if he was going to be convicted, he should have served out the sentence given to him by a jury of his peers: life without parole, but he didn't.

And once he was on death row, Alabama should have ended the practice that robbed him of a just result.

But they didn't get around to it for over 40 years, and even then, they couldn't bring themselves to override the override.

John Forrest Parker never stood a chance.

Next time on the Alabama murders.

This is how lethal injection actually kills you.

It kills you by burning your lungs up.

So the last thing that, you know, you may know is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die.

Is this too graphic?

Look,

if you come back here and you start coming, and these guys ask you to go all the way with them, you got to be willing to go.

And I said, What's all the way?

He said, Well, you know, if they're executions, and if they ask you to be with them, you need you can't, you need to be willing to go.

And if you're not, just don't come.

Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nadaf Haffrey, Lucy Sullivan, and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Additional reporting by Ben Nadaf Haffrey and Lee Hedgespeth.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Fact-checking by Kate Ferby.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.

Production support from Lou Clemond.

Original scoring by Luis Guerra with Paul Brainard and Jimmy Bodd.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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