This is a guest opinion column

If Birmingham’s storied civil rights history has taught us anything, it is this: sometimes true justice eludes us on our first try. When that happens, the best chance we have at righting our mistakes is a prosecutor motivated by an abiding sense of justice, one who is willing to take the courageous step of revisiting a case that others consider settled.

That is what Jefferson County, Alabama District Attorney Danny Carr has tried to do in the case of Toforest Johnson, a man who has spent the past 26 years on Alabama’s death row. Along with Jeff Wallace, the former Assistant District Attorney who originally prosecuted Johnson in 1998, Carr and his office have concluded that the case against Johnson has “disintegrated” and are seeking to overturn his conviction.

Both of us have had long careers in the Alabama justice system. We have learned, firsthand, the importance of allowing prosecutors the discretion to fix past mistakes. In different capacities and at different times, we prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the tragic 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four precious young girls in Birmingham in 1963. State and local authorities never seriously investigated the case, and in 1968 J. Edgar Hoover closed the FBI investigation without bringing any charges. The community to which those killed and injured belonged was left with no answers and no closure.

As prosecutors in Alabama years later, each of us knew that we could not let the men responsible for such a horrific, racially motivated crime remain unaccountable. Over the course of the next three decades our teams managed to bring three men to justice.

In 1970, one of us (Baxley) was elected Attorney General of Alabama and reopened the investigation into the bombing. The mastermind of the KKK attackers, Robert Chambliss, was indicted and brought to trial in 1977. Fourteen years after the bombing, Chambliss, also known as “Dynamite Bob,” was convicted of the first-degree murder of 11-year-old Denise McNair and sentenced to life in prison.

Decades later, the federal government re-opened the case against the remaining attackers. As the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, the other of us (Jones) successfully obtained convictions for murder of the Klansmen who were still alive, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Like Chambliss before them, Blanton and Cherry were each sentenced to life in prison.

Had we not been able to revisit the mistakes of the past, the Birmingham community would never have seen justice for the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Prosecutors must be able to correct past mistakes. In the case of the church bombing, the mistake was not to prosecute. Sometimes, as in the case of Toforest Johnson, the mistake is in the opposite direction, leading to the conviction of an innocent person.

Perhaps no case is as riddled with mistakes as Johnson’s. He was sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder of Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy William Hardy. In 2020, current District Attorney Carr spent nearly nine months reviewing the facts of Johnson’s case. His investigation revealed serious issues underlying Johnson’s conviction, including that the State’s star witness was secretly paid $5,000 for her testimony and that credible alibi witnesses placed Johnson across town at the time of the murder. With the full support of Jeff Wallace, the original trial prosecutor, Carr concluded that the case against Johnson was so flawed that the interest of justice demanded a new trial.

Prosecutors who are willing to correct past wrongs should be celebrated. Yet the State has taken a position in complete disregard of Carr’s investigation, going so far as to suggest that he should not be allowed to share the results of his reinvestigation of a case that his own office prosecuted. The State has argued that Carr “acted outside the scope of duties” by even conducting his review.

That suggestion is not only illogical, it is outright dangerous. The integrity of our criminal justice system depends on prosecutors being able to speak out when they believe a miscarriage of justice has occurred. If anything, public policy ought to demand that prosecutors in Carr’s position be required to speak out when they see a case where an injustice has occurred, especially a case that was originally prosecuted by their own office.

We believe that the evidence in this case raises serious doubts about Johnson’s guilt and we are deeply troubled by the State’s efforts to proceed with his execution. In our criminal justice system, prosecutors wield immense power. With that power comes the responsibility to ensure that when mistakes are made, they are remedied. The opinions and recommendations of the Jefferson County District Attorney and the original trial prosecutor in this case should matter—to both the courts and the public.

Doug Jones is a former U.S. Senator from Alabama and served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 to 2001. Bill Baxley served as Alabama’s Attorney General from 1971 to 1979 and as the Lieutenant Governor of Alabama from 1983 to 1987. Both are still active trial lawyers, and both recently joined an amicus brief on behalf of former Alabama prosecutors in support of a new trial for Toforest Johnson.