Pardue v. State

In 1973, the appellant, Michael Rene Pardue, pleaded guilty to the murder of William Harvey Hodges. In 1995, following a federal court order granting Pardue's petition for habeas corpus relief, Pardue was reindicted by a Mobile County grand jury; he was subsequently found guilty by a jury of the murder of Hodges. He was sentenced to serve 100 years in prison with credit given for 22 years already served. The appellant was originally charged with three murders that occurred between midnight and 6:00 a.m. on May 22, 1973. Two of the murders took place in Mobile County and one in Baldwin County. On October 24, 1973, the appellant pleaded guilty in Mobile Circuit Court to first degree murder for the murder of William Harvey Hodges and Theodore Roosevelt White. The appellant was convicted after a jury trial in Baldwin County Circuit Court for the murder of Ronald Rider. That conviction was reversed by the Alabama Supreme Court in Ex parte Pardue, 661 So.2d 268 (Ala. 1994). On December 16, 1994, pursuant to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the voluntariness of his confession, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama overturned the Mobile convictions for the murders of Hodges and White. The Federal court gave the State of Alabama 180 days to retry the appellant or dismiss the indictments. Pardue was reindicted for the murder of Hodges and the State nol-prossed the charge for the murder of White because vital witnesses had died.