Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey commutes first death row sentence since 1999

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has announced the commutation of Robin “Rocky” Myers from death row to life in prison without parole, marking the second time since the death penalty was reinstated in the state in 1976 that a sitting governor has commuted a death sentence.

Myers has been on death row since for over 30 years after being convicted in the murder of Ludie Mae Tucker, who was stabbed to death at her home in Decatur on October 4, 1991.

In a statement sent out by her office Friday, Ivey said she first announced her decision to Tucker’s family, subsequently alerting Attorney General Steve Marshall.

Ivey, who has presided over 22 executions since becoming governor in 2017, said that while she believed the death penalty was a “just punishment for society’s most serious crimes,” she had questions about the Myers case. In discussing Tucker’s death, Ivey claimed no murder weapon was ever found and that no DNA, fingerprint evidence, eyewitness testimony ever definitively linked Myers, who knew Tucker, to her death.

“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,” Ivey said in her statement. “I therefore must respect both the jury’s decision to convict him and its recommendation that he be sentenced to life without parole.”

Myers’ commutation, which Ivey called one of the most difficult she has ever had to make as governor, comes following the Alabama Supreme Court’s action on Feb. 21 to carry out his death sentence. Mae Puckett, a juror in Myers’ case, subsequently pleaded for Ivey to spare Myers’ life.

“I know he is innocent,” Puckett said in an interview with The Associated Press. “They never proved he did it. They never proved he was in the house.”

According to the AP, Myers’ trial, conviction and life on death row have had issues. For one, the judge in the case overrode the jury’s recommendation that he serve life in prison, giving him the death penalty instead. Myers also missed a federal appeal deadline 2003 due to his previous attorney stepping away from the case. In addition, a witness used by the prosecution has since walked back their statement.

Myers, who is now 63 years old and intellectually disabled, is the first death row inmate in 26 years to have their sentence commuted. The first and last commutation since Alabama brought back the death penalty was in 1999, when former Gov. Fob James–in one of his final acts as governor, commuted the death row sentence of Judith Ann Neelley, who had been convicted in the 1982 kidnapping, rape and murder of 13-year-old Lisa Ann Millican, along with Neelley’s husband, Alvin, who died in prison in 2005.

James has never explained why he commuted Neelley’s sentence.

Since 1976, there have been 79 people executed in Alabama. Despite Ivey’s support of the death penalty, former Alabama governors have come to regret not commuting enough sentences. In a joint op-ed published in the Washington Post in 2023, former Govs. Don Siegelman and Robert Bentley expressed regret over the 16 combined executions they oversaw in office.

“As former Alabama governors, we have come over time to see the flaws in our nation’s justice system and to view the state’s death penalty laws in particular as legally and morally troubling,” the op-ed read. “We both presided over executions while in office, but if we had known then what we know now about prosecutorial misconduct, we would have exercised our constitutional authority to commute death sentences to life.”

In the op-ed, Siegelman and Bentley called for commuting 146 death sentences that had been done by non-unanimous juries or judicial override.