Two former Alabama governors from both sides of the political aisle announced their support Tuesday for a state bill that would retroactively apply the ban on judges from overturning a jury’s decision in death penalty cases.

Former Govs. Robert Bentley, a Republican, and Don Siegelman, a Democrat, noted that there are 30 Alabama Death Row inmates whose life sentences handed down by juries were overridden by judges who instituted the death penalty.

The practice, known as judicial override, was banned in Alabama in 2017. But the law’s language meant that Death Row inmates whose juries returned life sentences only to be overridden by the judge presiding over the case would be unaffected by the new law.

Before judicial override was banned, a jury’s sentence was considered “advisory” and nonbinding.

This bill HB 27, which is scheduled for debate Wednesday in the House Judiciary Committee and sponsored by Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, would fix the 2017 law to retroactively apply the judicial override ban. The bill “would provide that a defendant may be resentenced if a judge sentenced him or her to a sentence other than the jury’s advisory sentence,” reads the synopsis of HB 27.

“The United States Supreme Court in … Hurst v. Florida, in 2016, ruled that only a jury, not a judge acting alone, could sentence someone to death. Alabama, following the Supreme Court ruling, and ever other state, banned judicial overrides in 2017. Gov. Ivey, to her credit, signed the law,” the governors said in a statement sent to AL.com by an aide to S Yet we still have 30 people on Alabama’s death row whose juries returned a verdict for life, not death. As former Alabama governors, Robert Bentley and I join in supporting HB 27, which corrects the oversight in the 2017 ban and will apply the Alabama law and the Supreme Court ruling of 2016 retroactively.”