Friend,

The court was in a hurry to resolve Flavius Henderson’s case.

Henderson had been arrested and charged with cocaine trafficking in Jefferson County, Alabama, in 2000. In May 2001, at the age of 47, he took his attorney’s advice and waived his right to a jury trial in the case. Things proceeded in a whirlwind. There was a short trial before the judge – no jury and no witnesses.

Henderson was convicted.

At the sentencing, his attorney objected to the use of Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act (HFOA) to sentence his client to life without parole. The defense, which didn’t get into the details of Henderson’s prior convictions, failed. Henderson went to prison for what was expected to be the rest of his life.

“Perhaps resigned, Henderson made no statement at sentencing,” a court document reads.

But there was a problem big enough to convince a judge years later to rescind the life-without-parole sentence – freeing him after 20 years in prison. Only two of Henderson’s three prior felony convictions appeared to qualify for use under the HFOA. His third prior felony conviction – a grand larceny conviction from 1979 involving the theft of $90 worth of car batteries – was invalid because of prosecutorial errors at the time.

When Henderson found himself on trial in the early 2000s, his defense attorney didn’t dispute these three apparent felony convictions. The decision not to challenge prosecutors on their use of these convictions occurred during a routine process known as stipulating facts, where both sides can accept facts outright about prior convictions, according to Alabama lawyers and legal experts. But it also means prosecutors, courts and defense attorneys might miss problems with prior convictions used to name someone a habitual offender and potentially put that person on the path to a life sentence.

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Sincerely,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center