Judges in Alabama used the option to override a jury more than 100 times over four decades, a report by the Equal Justice Initiative found. In a vast majority of instances, judges overruled in favor of the harsher sentence. At one point, some 20 percent of death row inmates were condemned in cases involving a judicial override.
In the trial of Kerry Spencer, the man who prosecutors said plotted with Mr. Woods and fired at the officers, the judge overruled a jury’s decision to impose a sentence of life in prison without parole and instead sentenced him to death. Mr. Spencer remains on death row. (In a recent interview with The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that covers the criminal justice system, Mr. Spencer called Mr. Woods “actually 100 percent innocent.”)
The death penalty has been on the decline in the United States, with seven states carrying out 22 executions last year, the second-lowest number since 1991. Last year, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abandon capital punishment.
Ms. Ivey, Alabama’s Republican governor who has been in office since 2017, has expressed a measure of discomfort over her role in capital cases and has avoided intervening in executions. “This is not a decision that I take lightly,” Ms. Ivey said on Thursday, “but I firmly believe in the rule of law and that justice must be served.”
The efforts to spare Mr. Woods received a surge of momentum as his execution approached. Martin Luther King III, the human rights activist and son of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote a letter to Ms. Ivey, asking her, “Are you willing to allow a potentially innocent man to be executed?”
Ms. Faraino, a onetime corporate lawyer, had stumbled across a mention of Mr. Woods’s execution in an email newsletter and it drew her interest.
She and her mother pored over thousands of pages of records from Mr. Woods’s case. Ms. Faraino then wrote a lengthy report that she shared widely, detailing the shortcomings she found with the official handling of the case and with his lawyers, all of which, she argued, posed lethal consequences to Mr. Woods.
