Free Willie Simmons, and end Alabama's habitual offender law

In 1982 Willie Simmons, then 25, took a wallet containing $9. He was convicted of first-degree robbery. Because he had three earlier convictions, Alabama's Habitual Felony Offender Act required the court to impose life without the possibility of parole. He is still in prison. He has now served more than forty years for nine dollars.

What the law does

The HFOA, passed in 1977, mandates life without parole once a defendant has three prior felony convictions and is convicted of a Class A felony. It does not distinguish between a career of violence and a run of poverty offences, and for most of its history a judge had no discretion to depart from it.

Alabama Sentencing Commission figures compiled by Smart Justice Alabama put 527 people serving life without parole for offences other than murder as of October 2019 — the source of the "more than 500" figure. Of those, an analysis found at least 300 have no sex offence on their record and 165 have no prior Class A felony. Three out of four people sentenced to die in prison under the HFOA are Black.

What we are trying to do

1. Get Mr Simmons out. Nothing else on this list helps him this year. Clemency, parole eligibility and resentencing are the routes that act on his sentence directly.
2. Build the record. Identify and document every person serving life without parole under the HFOA for a non-homicide offence, so the law is argued against a body of cases rather than one sympathetic story.
3. Take the question up. Ask the courts to hold that a life-without-parole sentence for a nine-dollar theft is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
4. Change the statute. Retroactive relief through the Alabama legislature reaches everyone at once; litigation reaches one person at a time.

What stands in the way

We will not pretend this is straightforward. In Rummel v. Estelle (1980) the Supreme Court upheld a life sentence imposed under a Texas recidivist statute for obtaining $120.75 by false pretences. It has never been overruled, and it is close to this case on its facts. Solem v. Helm (1983) struck down a comparable sentence, but Harmelin (1991) and Ewing (2003) narrowed proportionality review substantially since.

So a direct constitutional challenge starts behind, and anyone joining this project should know that. It is also why the legislative and clemency tracks are not a fallback but a parallel effort: the realistic path to freeing more than five hundred people runs through Montgomery at least as much as through Washington.

Sources

• Smart Justice Alabama, Report: Alabama's Habitual Offender Law — the 527 and 300 figures, Alabama Sentencing Commission data, October 2019.
• Justice for Willie Simmons (justiceforwilliesimmons.org) — status, updated September 2026.
• Alabama Code § 13A-5-9 (Habitual Felony Offender Act).
• Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U.S. 263 (1980); Solem v. Helm, 463 U.S. 277 (1983); Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11 (2003).