Mobile Death Row Inmate Dennis Hicks Re-Sentenced to Death

A Mobile County man already on death row has been formally re-sentenced to death for a capital murder conviction, according to the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office. Dennis Hicks was convicted of capital murder in 2016 for the killing of Joshua Duncan and was originally sentenced to death.

After his conviction was affirmed on appeal in July, a resentencing hearing was held Tuesday, where he again received the death penalty, prosecutors said. Prosecutors described Duncan’s killing as brutal, though further details about the underlying crime were not included in the announcement. The state at the resentencing was represented by Assistant District Attorneys Jennifer Wright and Keith Blackwood, who now serves as Mobile County’s District Attorney.

Hicks remains on death row. Under Alabama law, death sentences are subject to further appellate review, but the resentencing restores the original punishment after the affirmation of his conviction.

Resentencing hearings are an uncommon and technical stage of capital litigation, but they have become a recurring feature of Alabama death penalty cases over the past decade. When an appellate court affirms a conviction but the original sentence must be re-imposed — whether because of changes in state law, procedural rulings or appellate instructions — the case returns to the trial court for a new sentencing phase rather than returning to square one. The jury’s work on guilt or innocence stands; what is litigated again is the punishment.

That is what brought the case back to a Mobile County courtroom on Tuesday. The 2016 conviction for Duncan’s killing had survived appeal, affirmed in July, and the resentencing hearing formally restored the punishment that prosecutors had sought from the beginning. Assistant District Attorneys Jennifer Wright and Keith Blackwood represented the state at the hearing — a notable detail in a case that has spanned years of Mobile County legal history, because Blackwood has since been elected the county’s District Attorney, the same office that announced the outcome.

The capital case process in Alabama

Alabama’s death penalty procedure differs from most states in ways that matter for understanding how a case like this one moves. In Alabama, juries hear the sentencing evidence and issue a recommendation — either death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole — and, following reforms passed in recent years, a death sentence may only be imposed when the jury’s recommendation for death is unanimous. The trial judge then conducts the sentencing, weighing statutory aggravating and mitigating factors before entering the final judgment.

Because the sentencing law has evolved since the mid-2010s, many convictions from that era have required sentencing proceedings to be redone under the current framework when they return from appeal. The result is the kind of hearing held Tuesday: a fresh sentencing determination, informed by the trial record, conducted under the rules now in force. Prosecutors again present the aggravating circumstances of the crime; the defense again presents mitigation evidence about the defendant; and the court again weighs both before imposing sentence.

Prosecutors described Duncan’s killing as brutal, though the announcement did not include further details of the underlying crime. Capital murder in Alabama is a defined category rather than a general description — it covers murders committed in connection with specified felonies, killings of certain classes of victims, and murders committed under other aggravating conditions named in the statute. Which provision applied in Hicks’s case was part of the trial record, but the District Attorney’s Office statement announcing the resentencing did not elaborate.

What happens next

The resentencing does not end the case. Under Alabama law, a death sentence triggers further appellate review as a matter of course. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reviews death sentences directly, examining both the conviction and the sentence, and its review can be followed by petitions to the Alabama Supreme Court and the federal courts. Direct appeals in capital cases are extensive by design: the courts examine trial errors, sentencing procedures, and whether the sentence was disproportionate or the product of passion or prejudice.

That process takes years. Death row inmates in Alabama routinely spend a decade or more between sentencing and final disposition, as direct appeals are followed by state post-conviction proceedings and, if pursued, federal habeas corpus review. Hicks, who remains on death row pending that process, is at the beginning of a new round of review that his resentencing formally started on Tuesday.

For the family of Joshua Duncan, the hearing marked another waypoint in a case that has now stretched across nearly a decade. Resentencing hearings re-open the courtroom to the people most affected by the crime, who must hear the circumstances of the killing described again, and prosecutors typically treat the proceedings as a renewal of the promises made at the original trial — that the state’s judgment will stand as long as the courts allow it to.

Mobile County’s capital docket

Mobile County has long carried one of the heavier capital dockets in Alabama, a state that itself sentences more people to death per capita than nearly any other. The District Attorney’s Office handles these cases with dedicated prosecutors, and the office’s practice has been to seek the death penalty in the most serious cases while resolving others with sentences of life without parole. Capital prosecutions demand years of work from a small office, and they continue to do so even when the prosecutors who began the case have moved on.

The continuity in this case is unusual. Keith Blackwood, who argued the state’s position at Tuesday’s hearing as an assistant district attorney, was elected Mobile County District Attorney in 2022 and took office in early 2023. Cases that long outlast the careers of the people who work them are common in capital litigation, but it is rare for the office’s current leader to have stood at the table in the same case at an earlier stage of his own career. Jennifer Wright, the other prosecutor at the hearing, is a veteran of the office’s capital casework. Together they presented the state’s sentencing case to the court, renewing the argument that the crime’s severity warranted the punishment the jury and judge imposed in 2016.

The announcement from the District Attorney’s Office was brief, as announcements of resentencing usually are. It confirmed the outcome — the death penalty imposed again, the conviction affirmed, the process moving forward — without revisiting the trial evidence or the victim’s death in detail. The restraint is typical: prosecutors generally limit public comment in active capital cases to avoid complicating the review that follows.

What the announcement makes clear is where the case stands. Dennis Hicks was convicted in 2016 of killing Joshua Duncan, that conviction was affirmed on appeal in July, and on Tuesday a Mobile County court again sentenced him to death. He remains on death row, where Alabama’s appellate process — automatic, multi-layered and slow — will now determine whether the sentence imposed a second time is the one ultimately carried out.

Alabama’s death row for men is housed at Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore, in the state’s southwestern corner, and the prison holds the state’s largest death row population. Inmates sentenced in Mobile County join that population while their appeals proceed, and the years between sentencing and execution or reversal are spent in the regimented environment of death row confinement, where inmates are held apart from the general population and their cases remain active in the courts.

The appellate record in Alabama capital cases is thorough because the stakes leave no room for less. The Court of Criminal Appeals reviews whether the trial was conducted properly, whether the evidence supported the conviction, whether the sentencing hearing complied with the law as it now stands, and whether aggravating circumstances justified the sentence. Attorneys for the state and the defense file extensive briefs, and the court’s written opinions become part of the record that later courts build on.

Resentencing hearings themselves are deliberately sober proceedings. The court hears from prosecutors on the circumstances of the offense and from defense counsel on the defendant’s background and circumstances, and victims’ families are given the opportunity to be heard under Alabama’s crime victims’ rights laws. The judge’s task is the same as it was at the original sentencing: to weigh the statutory factors and impose the lawful sentence, this time under the framework the appellate courts have since established.

For Mobile County’s prosecutors, the outcome closed a loop that opened nearly a decade ago. The 2016 trial established guilt; the years of appeals tested it; the July affirmation upheld it; and Tuesday’s hearing restored the sentence. The case now moves into the appellate phase that every Alabama death sentence enters, where the same two questions — was the conviction sound, and is the sentence lawful — will be answered once more before the punishment can be considered final.