by Amy Yurkanin

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When 19-year-old Jorge Ruiz walked into the Autauga County Jail in handcuffs on Oct. 28, 2018, he wasn’t a typical suspect. He was out of place and in big trouble in a deeply conservative part of Alabama.

That morning, he’d been driving about 70 miles per hour in a 55 zone when he crossed the center line of a two-lane rural highway. His Ford pickup collided head-on with a Honda Civic, killing the woman behind the wheel. Paramedics took Ruiz to the hospital, where a blood test found a trace amount of alcohol. At just 0.016, it was below the legal threshold for intoxication.

But rather than charging him with manslaughter, which typically would be the most extreme charge brought under the circumstances, police went further. They arrested him for murder.

To support such a murder charge, prosecutors are supposed to show that a defendant’s conduct displays “extreme indifference” — behavior so reckless that someone is likely to die, as when a person fires a gun into a crowd or steers a boat into a group of swimmers. Suspects charged with murder after car crashes often are documented to have blood alcohol levels more than twice the legal limit and 10 times the level found in Ruiz’s blood, according to a review of Alabama cases from the last 20 years by ProPublica. Many others had prior DUIs or were driving 100 miles per hour or more. In this case, the suspect had a clean criminal history and wasn’t even going fast enough to be ticketed for aggravated speeding.

Ruiz’s trial attorney said that as soon as he started talking to the district attorney’s office, the case felt different. Across the three counties in Alabama’s 19th Circuit Court, only a handful of people have been charged with murder for a car accident in the span of a decade — and most wound up taking a plea deal for a lesser charge.

But this time around, the prosecutor’s offer could hardly be considered a deal at all: The teenager would have to plead guilty to murder, and it would be blind plea, meaning he would have to hope for mercy from the court in his sentencing. “In my 30 years of practicing law, I have never been offered a deal like that,” Ruiz’s court-appointed lawyer, Richard Lively, said.

The lead prosecutor eventually budged, but only a little. He wouldn’t reduce the charge, but he would recommend that the teenager spend 30 years in prison.

That’s longer than any other sentence handed down since at least 2004 for a car crash fatality in Alabama’s 19th Circuit Court, which includes Autauga, Chilton and Elmore counties. A man who fled the scene of a fatal crash — and had a 0.09 blood alcohol level nine hours later — received a 15-year sentence in 2017. A woman who had three times the legal limit of alcohol in her system received 23 years in 2007 after she killed a University of Alabama student.

For defendants who were teenagers when they caused fatal car accidents, the courts can be even more lenient. In 2012, a Madison County judge granted youthful offender status to a man who was 19 when he was charged with murder for a drunk driving crash that killed a high school sophomore in Huntsville. The driver, who had a blood alcohol level of 0.15, was sentenced to a year in jail and two on probation.

Lively had a hard time squaring his client’s charges with the results of his blood test and recorded speed. Alabama’s murder statute does not require a driver to be legally intoxicated, and people have faced murder charges for killing someone by racing or fleeing police. But neither applied here. Lively reasoned that for murder to fit, the teenager would have had to be intentionally driving into oncoming traffic.

He thought his client could beat the charge and told him not to plead guilty. Years later, attorneys involved in the case would attempt to shed light on what was so different about it — and on one fact in particular that they believed eclipsed all the others.

He was a Mexican immigrant.

The case against Ruiz was, as one legal expert put it, “a perfect storm of horrible facts.”

The night before the accident, he stayed up late after drinking at a music festival in Birmingham. At the scene of the crash, police found beer cans in his truck. He was in the country on a temporary work visa and did not have a driver’s license. He spoke little English, relying on his 17-year-old cousin to translate his Miranda rights and the string of questions from police.

The only reason Ruiz was in Autauga County was to visit his extended family after finishing a monthslong job in Georgia and South Carolina clearing brush from power lines. He was days away from returning to Mexico.

The woman he killed was named Marlena Hayes. She was a 29-year-old nurse who’d just finished the night shift at Prattville Baptist Hospital. She wasn’t even supposed to be working at that time. She’d planned to see her brother perform that weekend with the marching band at the University of West Alabama. In the end, though, she took the shift as a favor to a colleague.

Newspapers and TV stations in central Alabama quickly picked up the story. Some referred to Ruiz as an illegal immigrant even though he’d been in the U.S. on a six-month H-2B visa, which are approved when employers can’t find enough American workers. One of those articles appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser, the largest newspaper in the area.

When Lively was assigned to the case, he felt compelled to show that his client had been in the U.S. legally. Ruiz’s visa had only lapsed when he was in jail. Lively tracked down the Montgomery Advertiser reporter at the Autauga County courthouse to show him that Ruiz’s visa had been valid when he was arrested. But even after that, the newspaper failed to acknowledge that he was in the country legally at the time of the crash. “The Montgomery Advertiser stands behind our reporting,” the newspaper said in a statement released through its parent company, Gannett.

In the years leading up to Ruiz’s arrest, Alabama had established itself as a particularly unwelcoming place for foreigners. In 2011, then-Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill that criminalized everyday activities like transporting, employing and renting homes to undocumented immigrants.

At the time, historians and legal experts worried the law could usher in a new era of racial injustice similar to Jim Crow that would be enforced by the police and courts. But the impact of the immigration law remains largely unknown because Alabama prisons don’t collect ethnicity data and therefore don’t know how many inmates are Hispanic. In 2013, the state agreed not to enforce most of the provisions as part of a lawsuit.

“The HB 56 legislation brought nativism and xenophobia into the political mainstream in Alabama” wrote historian Raymond Mohl. At the height of the debate over the law, a congressman from north Alabama........

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