This is an opinion column.

Gov. Kay Ivey made Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall sad.

Not just somewhat sad but “deeply saddened,” or so Marshall wrote in a letter to the governor after she commuted the death sentence of Robin “Rocky” Myers to life in prison.

“I am astonished by Governor Ivey’s decision to commute the death sentence of Rocky Myers and am bewildered that she chose not to directly communicate with me about this case or her decision,” Marshall said.

Astonished?

Bewildered?

Somebody get that man some smelling salts before he faints.

It shouldn’t astonish or bewilder Marshall that Ivey didn’t want to put Myers to death. The jury that convicted Myers in 1993 didn’t want to kill him, either.

According to one of those jurors, the jury had been divided on Myers’s guilt, with three holdouts pushing for the death penalty. Their verdict — guilty with a recommendation for life in prison — had been a compromise verdict.

However, the judge in the case overrode the jury’s recommendation and gave him the death penalty, anyway, a practice since outlawed by the Alabama Legislature.

Judicial override aside, the case against Myers was a sloppy mess, riddled with witnesses who changed their stories before and after the trial.

Myers scored between 64 and 71 on IQ tests when he was a kid and before the murder. The victim — who was alert when police found her and who knew Myers, a neighbor — didn’t identify him as the killer before she died, nor could a second victim who survived the attack that night.

And no physical evidence linking Myers to the crime.

A palmprint taken from the scene and fingerprints lifted from a VCR stolen from the victim’s home didn’t match Myers, either.

Two witnesses later said Myers had traded the stolen VCR for crack cocaine, although those witnesses also identified others before and after.

Another witness from the crackhouse said police dropped an auto theft case against him in exchange for his testimony that implicated Myers. He now says he lied, and police dumped the car he stole by the side of a road.

All of this is to say, there are many reasons to doubt Myers’s guilt — enough to convince Ivey the state shouldn’t kill him, though not enough for her to set him free.

Because one of his lawyers missed a crucial appeals deadline in 2003, Myers has little legal recourse left and will likely still die in prison, just not at an appointed time this spring.

That’s something, I guess.

I’ve been harshly critical of how Ivey has neglected and ignored even more clear-cut cases of wrongful conviction on Alabama’s death row, and I’m not going to let her off the hook for that quite yet. Ivey made the right call in Myers’s case, but there’s still work to be done.

Toforrest Johnson is still there.

Prosecutors were so uncertain of Johnson’s case, they simultaneously charged another man with the same murder, even though only one of them could have done it. As it turns out, both men had multiple alibi witnesses putting them across town at the time of the murder, and even the prosecutor who brought the case now says Johnson deserves at least another trial.

Christopher Barbour is still there, too.

His defense lawyers fought to test DNA collected at the scene of a 1992 rape and murder. Not only did that DNA not implicate Barbour, but it matched a neighbor — a neighbor now in prison for later murdering somebody else.

In all three cases, the Alabama Attorney General’s office has fought to walk these men into Alabama’s execution chamber despite not just reasonable doubt of their guilt but compelling evidence of their innocence.

In Barbour’s case, the Alabama Attorney General’s office fought against testing that DNA until a court ruled against them in 2023, more than 30 years after the murder.

And despite that evidence pointing to someone else, state prosecutors still insist Barbour did it and should die.

“It is puzzling that in this case, the State downplays the significance of the new DNA evidence when the State otherwise relies on similar DNA evidence to secure convictions and clear cold cases,” U.S. District Judge Emily Marks, who is reviewing the case, wrote last year.

Not just puzzling.

It’s bewildering.

And absolutely on par for Steve Marshall.

Marshall would rather cover up a broken system than fix it. He would rather put innocent people to death than explain how they got on death row in the first place, which is why we need a governor who will do that for him.

That’s the astonishing thing here, not the governor exercising her duty under the law, but an attorney general who would rather kill a prisoner than question his guilt.

And that’s so much worse than sad.

Kyle Whitmire is the Washington watchdog columnist for AL.com and winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. You can follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X , Threads and Bluesky.