Tracie Todd, an Alabama judge who was twice suspended from the bench since 2021 and convicted last year of violating judicial ethics, has resigned effective Dec. 6, state officials said Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. Todd was elected to the criminal court in Birmingham in 2012 and reelected without opposition in 2018. In October 2022, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary found Todd guilty of one charge of violating judicial ethics and suspended her without pay for 120 days. She returned to the bench in early 2023.
Todd first made headlines in 2016 when she ruled that Alabama's death penalty was unconstitutional, barring Jefferson County prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in four cases and declaring the state’s death-penalty statute to be unconstitutional. Todd noted in her decision that “Alabama has become a clear outlier” by permitting judges to impose death sentences by overriding jury votes for life." In 2021, she was first suspended from the bench after a scathing 100-plus page complaint was filed against her by the Judicial Inquiry Commission. She was suspended again in March 2022 on new complaints that she didn’t follow the orders of the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.