522
Stevens, J., dissenting
ing" fact, ante, at 513, but dismisses it as inconclusive, because "[w]e do not know . . . how many cases in which a jury recommendation of life imprisonment is adopted would have ended differently had the judge not been required to consider the jury's advice," ibid. This attempt to shrug off the reality of Alabama capital sentencing misses the point. Perhaps Alabama judges would be even more severe, and their sentences even more frequently inconsistent with the community's sense of justice, if Alabama provided for no jury verdicts at all. But the proper frame of reference is not a sentencing scheme with no jury; rather, it is a sentencing scheme with no judge—the scheme maintained by 29 of 37 States with capital punishment. In that comparison, the fact that Alabama trial judges have overridden more than nine juries' life recommendations for every vetoed death recommendation is conclusive indeed. Death sentences imposed by judges, especially against jury recommendations, sever the critical "link between contemporary community values and the penal system." Witherspoon, 391 U. S., at 519, n. 15. They result in the execution of defendants whom the community would spare.
Death sentences imposed by judges over contrary jury verdicts do more than countermand the community's judgment: They express contempt for that judgment. Judicial overrides undermine the jury system's central tenet that "sharing in the administration of justice is a phase of civic responsibility." Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co., 328 U. S. 217, 227 (1946) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting). Overrides also sacrifice the legitimacy of jury verdicts, at potentially great cost. Whereas the public presumes that a death sentence imposed by a jury reflects the community's judgment that death is the appropriate response to the defendant's crime, the same presumption does not attach to a lone government
more stringent standard that governs overrides in the other States. See infra, at Part III.
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