The sun had just set on a muggy July evening when Joe C. Davis died. He’d been at UAB Hospital for two weeks, a long time for a person incarcerated in Alabama’s prison system. No matter how sick they are, prison administrators don’t like to let incarcerated people languish under expensive hospital care. But Mr. Davis, 75, had been physically decompensating for some time due to congestive heart failure and other serious conditions, in and out of the infirmary at William E. Donaldson prison where he’d served over 40 years in state custody.
When he died in a hospital bed at 8:00 p.m. on July 8, Mr. Davis had been waiting for the state to schedule his first ever parole hearing for almost a year, allowing himself to hope that he might enjoy even a tiny bit of freedom outside the custody of ADOC before his death. He died with advantages in his favor—people working to free him, a newly reduced parole-eligible sentence, an attorney and family members trying to secure a medical furlough, but all that still wasn’t enough.
Sometimes, in a place where the system views people like Joe C. Davis as widgets to be crushed in the criminal punishment machine, even a Herculean effort to undo a grossly disproportionate sentence cannot fix what’s already been done. The closest he would get to freedom was a window in the hospital room where he died. It’s a terrible outcome in a story about a bloated and indifferent system filled with aging prisoners who do not pose a threat to public safety, yet cannot find a way out of the state’s grip, no matter how strong the argument for release.
Alabama Appleseed just published an excellent report on the shameful reality of our aging prison population called “Unsustainable.”
For a person once condemned to die in prison, Mr. Davis got heartbreakingly close to freedom right at the end of his life. In August 2021, Jefferson County circuit judge Stephen Wallace granted a petition Mr. Davis filed asking for a reduced sentence, giving Joe Davis his first real shot at freedom in over four decades behind the walls of prison. Mr. Davis was among over 500 people serving life or life without parole for robbery under Alabama’s hideous habitual offender law.
In July 2021, Mr. Davis filed the petition, asking the court to reconsider his sentence, what’s known in Alabama as a “Rule 32.” It certainly wasn’t his first time to file an appeal. Mr. Davis had mounted a decades-long effort to free himself over the years, but this was the first time he had the help of a criminal defense attorney, Birmingham-based Richard A. Storm.
“It breaks my heart,” Storm told me after Joe Davis died. Mr. Davis had hired Storm, who has successfully won freedom for some of the men sentenced to life without parole under the habitual offender law. I talked to Storm on the phone after I received a notice of Mr. Davis’s death from the Jefferson County medical examiner. Storm sighed repeatedly in frustration during the call, clearly exasperated that his efforts didn’t end with Mr. Davis going home. “Nobody cares about these people dying in prison,” Storm finally said. “41 years. My God, what more did they need?”
I understand Storm’s disappointment given all the factors working in Mr. Davis’s favor. While Storm was preparing Joe Davis’s legal petition, Davis’s health was rapidly declining and it wasn’t clear that he would make it. Storm said Mr. Davis’s family tried to secure a medical furlough in case the legal petition didn’t have a positive outcome. His family obtained the necessary paperwork to apply to ADOC’s medical furlough program, including a physician’s statement confirming that Davis met the medical requirements—that he was over 55 and geriatric, suffering from a life-threatening illness.
The issue that prevented ADOC from granting medical furlough, according to Storm, was where Mr. Davis would live. At first Davis considered living with a family member in Birmingham who resided in Section 8 affordable housing, but that community included a restriction against people with felony convictions. Storm said he then secured a bed for Mr. Davis at one of the only residential re-entry facilities in the state, but ADOC was not willing to furlough Mr. Davis to a group home that included other formerly incarcerated people. It seemed every avenue they tried to take, a brick wall stood in their path.
In July of 2021, Storm argued on Joe’s behalf that his life without parole sentence for robbery and assault was excessive, a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. District Attorney Danny Carr did not oppose Davis’s request for relief and the following month, Judge Wallace granted his petition, issuing a 14-page order that reduced Davis’s sentence to life with the possibility of parole. Wallace wrote:
“Davis is hardly the repeat offender envisioned by the law. There is no evidence that anyone was harmed or injured for any of his crimes….. his prior felony convictions include mainly theft related offenses committed in his youth. Significant is that his co-defendant with a similar record has been granted relief and was long ago released from custody.”
Davis’s co-defendant is a man I’ve previously written about, Lawrence Posey. I reached Posey by phone and he’d already heard the news of Davis’s death. He didn’t know Joe Davis well when they were tried and convicted together in the robbery of a grocery store. Unlike Joe Davis, Posey was released from prison in 2011 and since then, he’s served as a teacher and peer counselor for several organizations, including UAB’s Community Justice Programs (formerly known as TASC) and currently facilitates group therapy for Aletheia House, a community-based, low-cost substance abuse treatment program. He had tried to help Joe Davis win a previous sentence reduction in court, but a judge refused to grant the request.
(Lawrence Posey was released from prison in 2011. He was tried and convicted with Joe Davis in 1991.)
“I can imagine how he felt being left behind, when we were there together in the same situation, life without parole,” Posey said. “It is disheartening. Some of us got out and others didn’t. It never was fair.”
My friend Ronald McKeithen also served time with Joe Davis at Donaldson prison. Ron was having dinner at my house over the summer when I told him Joe had died. “Joe Davis…. Joe Davis…..,” Ron scratched his chin and tried to place a name with a face. I grabbed my laptop and opened a grid I created that contains everyone I could identify serving life without parole in Alabama under the habitual offender law. I located Joe’s prison mugshot in the grid and pointed it out to Ron. “Oh man. I know him,” Ron said. “I knew him.” He shook his head slowly, visibly shaken. “He was a good dude. He used to always talk to me about getting out. Man, that hurts my heart.”
Alabama passed the habitual felony offender act (HFOA) in 1977 and mandated these devastating sentences, giving judges no discretion. As early as 1985, criminologists began examining the costs of imposing lifetime sentences under this policy, and found little true public safety benefit, plus throwing people away destroyed lives and families. Dennis Peck, Ph.D, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Alabama, reported that the first person to receive a life without parole sentence under the law occurred in 1981, but by 1985, the state had condemned 315 people to die in prison under the habitual offender, 12 of them women.
The law, written by then Attorney General Charlie “fry ‘em till their eyes pop out” Graddick, always carried a “definitive political tone,” as Peck argued. It was never really about crime deterrence or prevention. Simple incapacitation was the goal and if that meant lifetime banishment, well… that didn’t bother folks like Graddick, as long as the banished people were poor, Black and outside his political constituency. And they were and still are—three out of four people who’ve been sentenced to die in prison for robbery are Black men, like Joe C. Davis.
In the order reducing Davis’s sentence, Wallace points out that it’s doubtful Mr. Davis would be sentenced to life without parole today. At least three of Davis’s prior convictions could now be classified as possible misdemeanors or Class D felonies, which cannot be used to enhance a sentence under HFOA. Davis’s re-sentencing order lists his prior convictions as follows:
1964- grand larceny
1969- grand larceny and burglary second degree
1971- robbery
1978- unlawfully possession a check payable to another
1981- robbery third degree
Additionally, Wallace researched similar state laws and found Alabama’s use of life without parole sentences is much broader than surrounding states, including Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas. Arkansas and Virginia both allow parole consideration for people serving life, except for repeat sex offenders, once they reach a certain age, 55 and 60 respectively. Even Mississippi expanded parole eligibility in 2021 for people convicted of most offenses. Additionally Wallace said this:
Nationwide, there is a growing consensus that life without parole sentences are excessive and disproportionate. One example of this is the First Step Act, a proposed congressional bill co-sponsored by former Alabama Senator Doug Jones and supported by a bipartisan coalition under President Donald Trump. Among the reforms, the First Step Act would replace life without parole sentences for third-offense felony drug trafficking convictions with a 25-year sentence and would allow prisoners sentenced prior to the Fair Sentencing Act (which adjusted the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine) to retroactively apply for resentencing.
Alabama’s political establishment is well aware of the reality, but hasn’t lifted a finger to correct this wrong, despite all the recent exposure amplifying disparate sentences and wasted lives, plus the widely known truth that this law is a huge reason behind prison overcrowding. They seem to ignore success stories of the few people who have managed to find freedom after once being condemned to spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. In fact, state leaders have doubled down, ensuring that lethal sentences under the habitual offender law stay in place. In 2014, then Senator Cam Ward sponsored a bill that inexplicably killed the one statutory mechanism available for this population to appeal their life sentences, slamming the door on people like Joe C. Davis.
It’s astonishing how maddeningly close Mr. Davis got to breaking free. But once he cleared the nearly insurmountable hurdle of winning a sentence reduction, another wait set in. His new sentence of life with the possibility of parole was entered into his prison record, but whatever bureaucratic levers needed to turn for the bureau of pardons and paroles to set a parole-eligibility date for Davis hadn’t happened. Mr. Posey told me he waited 14-months for an eligibility date after his sentence was initially reduced in 2009. And once a person gets an eligibility date, another wait begins for a parole hearing to be scheduled. That can sometimes take years. No matter how dire the conditions inside the prisons or how close to death a person may be, the system exhibits zero urgency.
The list of people sent to die in prison for non-homicides continues to shrink, not because Alabama leaders are creating pathways out of prison for them to re-join their families and communities, but because the people grow old, sick and die in prison. Sometimes, like in the case of Joe C. Davis, a fervent effort to try to secure freedom tries to beat the proverbial clock that tick tick ticks for all of them, all the way until the end. I know Mr. Davis deserved better. His family knows this, his attorney, along with people in the prison who saw him quietly serve his time, over the years his dark afro turning to grey and eventually white. Alabama leaders don’t want to see him. They have turned away indifferently or even worse, worked to make release impossible for these old men and women. But those of us who care will not stop telling their stories or advocating for second chances.
I really do appreciate this article of my father. He passed away right in front of me. I just knew I was finally going to get to bring him home and all I could think about was the way the guards still had the handcuffs on his ankles swelling them up while he was on his hospital bed helpless I begged the guards for hours to remove them but instead they removed me from his room and the hospital. They were rude to me and my father even on his death bed. But the nurses at uab were to kind and gentle with him especially nurse Ping she work overtime taking care of he with care. The Warren at the prison announced my father dead 2 weeks before he even actually died. I had hope that I would finally bring him home but my father gave his last three breaths I knew he was tired. I will always cherish my father because of his faith and strength I carry his remains with me everyday and everywhere. I never had him in my life because he been in that same prison every since his late wife my mother was pregnant with me but I have him now. I love u father Elohim as my mother would call him and your death will not be I'm vain. Thank you Beth for your article of my father. He's the reason I finished my bachelor in criminal justice this year on his birthday. May he live forever in me.
> Storm said he then secured a bed for Mr. Davis at one of the only residential re-entry facilities in the state, but ADOC was not willing to furlough Mr. Davis to a group home that included other formerly incarcerated people.
At that point there is no disguising that this is just cruelty. Someone who gets paid by the State defines their job to include being sadistic. What re-entry facility doesn't include former felons?
And again, being punished for being poor. Suppository if his surviving family didn't need a Section 8 apartment he would have been able to get a date, for a date, for a hearing to be released.