Walter Leroy Moody, Jr., 83, the oldest inmate on Alabama's death row, is set to die by lethal injection for a bombing nearly three decades ago that killed a federal appeals court judge.
U.S. 11th Circuit Judge Robert Vance, Sr., was killed on Dec. 16, 1989 in the blast from a pipe bomb hidden in a package sent to his Mountain Brook, Ala., home. The judge’s wife, Helen, was seriously injured in the blast. Read More ↓
In 1991, a federal jury convicted Moody of 71 charges related to the pipe-bomb murders of Vance and Georgia civil rights attorney Robert E. Robinson, who also was killed by a pipe bomb two days after the judge. The federal trial was conducted in Minnesota. Five years later, Moody was convicted in Alabama, sentenced to death and placed on death row.
Moody has denied involvement in the bombings.
Moody is now arguing to the 11th Circuit that the federal government, which convicted him first on non-capital charges — and not the state which later sentenced him to death — should have him in custody.
Part of Moody's appeal concerns his decision to represent himself at his 1996 capital murder trial in Alabama. After convicting him, the jury voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence. Courts have found that the trial judge did not err in allowing Moody to represent himself.
Much of the prosecutors’ evidence centered on the similarities between pipe bombs Moody had previously been convicted of using.
According to a summary of the bombings and investigations in one federal court document, prosecutors claimed that in May 1972, a bomb exploded in Moody's home in Macon, Ga. “The bomb, contained in a package addressed to a car dealer who had repossessed Moody's car, exploded when opened by Moody's wife. Moody was convicted in federal court in Macon for possessing the bomb, although he was acquitted of manufacturing it, and he served three years in federal prison.”
“Moody eventually became obsessed with overturning his 1972 conviction. He devised an elaborate story to shift the blame to a mythical 'Gene Wallace,' who Moody had claimed at trial had been attempting to assist him in regaining possession of his car and was responsible for the bomb,” according to the court document. “Moody recruited a witness to substantiate his account, a destitute, young handicapped woman, Julie Linn-West, and he paid her in small monthly installments as she learned her fabricated story. Moody petitioned for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis, seeking to overturn his 1972 conviction.”
A lower federal court denied his petition and then a panel of three 11th Circuit judges (Vance was not one of them) affirmed the decision. The entire court agreed in August 1989. Soon after the appeals court denied Moody's appeal, according to federal prosecutors, "Moody began to prepare to do battle with the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals."
Besides the bombs that killed Vance and Robinson, two others were intercepted – one to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals building in Atlanta and another to the Jacksonville, Fla., Office of the NAACP.