An open letter to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey

Looking back, in 2016, on his career for an article in the Selma Times-Journal, retired Alabama Judge Jack Meigs “said serving as a judge wasn’t an easy task.” He elaborated: “I didn’t feel like I was under stress while I was on the bench. After I left, I said ‘yeah,’ you really were. Twenty-five years to do something like that is a long time.” It was stressful Meigs said, because “You just have to consider the responsibility that is placed on you because you are affecting people’s lives, and I’ve always tried to take that seriously and to consider the people.”

However, in the capital case of Jeffery Lee—whose execution is scheduled for September 17—Judge Meigs did not consider the people. Because a majority of Lee’s jury, a jury who heard a molehill of mitigation evidence despite the mountain that existed, voted Lee’s life should be spared despite the terrible crimes he committed; Lee’s attorney had never handled a capital case and he never presented readily available evidence of Lee’s early abject childhood poverty (including food deprivation), his abusive childhood home, his spiraling drug addiction beginning at 8 years old huffing gasoline fumes, and an insufficiently treated traumatic brain injury Lee suffered when, on the way to high school, he was hit head-on by an........

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