The Neelley Commutation

When senior partners at Sirote & Permutt assigned 31-year-old Barry Ragsdale to the pro bono representation of Judith Ann Neelley in 1989, he tried to pass. “I still have the memo I wrote that said, ‘No, I’m not going to do this because it’s pro bono—I won’t get any credit toward my billable-hour goals and collected-dollar goals,’” Ragsdale says. “They correctly ignored me and told me to get to work.”

He adds: “If I’m going to get credit for having taken on a pro bono death penalty case for 30 years, I ought to get a little criticism for the fact that I tried to get out of it.”

It turned out to be a brutal case. In 1983, Neelley had been convicted of the killing of 13-year-old Lisa Ann Millican, whom Neelley and her husband, Alvin Neelley, had kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and injected with drain cleaner before Judith Neelley shot her and dumped her body into Little River Canyon in Dekalb County, Alabama. A jury recommended life without parole, but Judge Randall Cole sentenced Neelley to death. At 18, she was the youngest woman sentenced to death in the U.S. (Alvin Neelley was not indicted for the murder of Millican but pled guilty to other abduction/murder crimes the couple committed and was sentenced to life; he died in prison in 2005.)

After the conviction and death sentence had been upheld twice, Ragsdale was tapped for the subsequent appeals. As a business litigator, he felt out of his depth.

“I had to learn from scratch,” he says. “I’ve always been politically liberal, and philosophically and ideologically opposed to the death penalty, but I hadn’t taken it on as a cause. One of the most insightful things I did was go see Bryan Stevenson, who, at the time, was deep in the Death Penalty Representation Project here in Alabama. He told me death penalty law is unique, complicated, and very difficult to decipher, and that the learning curve would be huge. He was right.”

At their first meeting, Ragsdale was startled by Neelley’s intellect. “As I learned more about the very unfortunate circumstances that she grew up in, I truly believe had she not fallen in with the man she married, she would’ve gone to school, been a normal person, and accomplished many things,” he says. “She’s very bright. At one point, I told her that was a drawback. If she was mentally deficient, I could use that as a defense.”

Those unfortunate circumstances—years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her husband, whom she married at 15—are what Ragsdale decided to focus on in her defense. Over the next several years, Ragsdale pursued a post-conviction appeal through the state courts and a habeas corpus petition through the federal courts. Both were unsuccessful. By 1998, Neelley was out of appeals. Ragsdale’s wife asked him to never do such work again. The death threats didn’t help.

“It seems trite to even say it, but I struggled, and I still struggle with it,” Ragsdale says. “My client had committed those crimes and admitted she had committed those crimes. There was no denying. That, to me, is a much separate question of whether the arms of the state should be used to kill somebody, and that aspect of it was easy for me. But I think about the family of her victims, and the wrath of destruction and murder that she left behind.”

Running out of time, Ragsdale conferred with his client on the idea of petitioning Gov. Fob James for clemency. It was a long shot; no Alabama governor had commuted a death sentence since 1954. But in a Birmingham Post-Herald story that ran in 1998, a reporter asked James whether he would grant a stay in the impending execution of Texas’ Karla Faye Tucker, who had killed two people during a burglary. “That’s a tough one,” Fob replied.

Ragsdale saved that column and shared it with Neelley, but ultimately decided it was not the “glimmer of hope” they thought it might be: Alabama had recently adopted lethal injection over the electric chair, which Ragsdale thought would “absolve James of any lingering qualms about executing a woman.”
Then James lost his bid for reelection. And then Ragsdale got a call from James’ chief legal adviser. “Rather unenthusiastically, he told me the governor was considering clemency before his term expired, and if we wanted to submit a petition, there were certain conditions,” Ragsdale says. “Namely, it had to be a secret. No AG. No press. No one.”

Dumbfounded, Ragsdale considered whether, ethically, he could support the offer, and whether he had to tell his opponent. “I resolved that I did not,” he says.

And in January 1999, James commuted Neelley’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Ragsdale says when he called Neelley, she “lost the capacity to cry.”

He adds: “Attorney General Bill Pryor was furious at being caught flatfooted, but all these years later we have become friends. Mostly, though, people were more outraged that Gov. James went through with the commutation than they were with me for not disclosing the petition.”

One thing James didn’t do was make Neelley ineligible for parole, and, initially, there was disagreement on whether that eligibility would begin 15 years from sentencing or commutation; but in 2003,the Alabama Legislature got into the act. It passed a bill stating: “Any person whose sentence to death has been commuted by the Governor shall not be eligible for parole.” And everyone wound up back in federal court.

“That was one of those things that I easily could have walked away from,” Ragsdale says. “But I felt strongly that that legislation was clearly unconstitutional, as frankly did the federal judge.” They won that case in 2016.

But that, finally, was that. Ragsdale didn’t represent Neelley at either of her parole hearings in 2018 and 2023. “I don’t think I’ll have any further involvement,” he says.

“I don’t believe that Judy will ever be paroled,” he continues. “But it makes a difference how you’re treated in prison if you are eligible for parole or not. It was important to Judy, particularly if she is going to spend the rest of her life in prison, that she be viewed as parole-eligible. I also think it was just a silly waste of judicial and legal resources to try to pass the statute to say she couldn’t be paroled when that was never going to happen anyway.”

Ragsdale still doesn’t know what inspired James’ decision. “He gave an interview in which he attempted to rationalize it by saying he had done it because the jury had recommended life, and only the judge had imposed the death penalty. The problem with that is he let a bunch of men die who had gone through exactly the same process,” Ragsdale says. “I am convinced this was some strange notion of chivalry. I think her gender saved her life. If nothing else, this case gets used as a poster child for restricting a governor’s abilities and for restricting eligibility for parole.”

For Ragsdale, now with Dominick Feld Hyde, the case serves as an enduring reminder of duty. “This defined for me the level of commitment that lawyers need to have,” he says. “It would’ve been very simple over the 30 years to just decide I’d done enough. Despite criticism and personal ramifications, despite being told that I was a terrible person, I felt, as a lawyer, I had a calling to continue. And I did. And frankly I’m proud of it.”