How a Fatal Car Crash Tested Alabama’s Justice System

When 19-year-old Jorge Ruiz walked into the Autauga County Jail in handcuffs on Oct. 28, 2018, he wasn’t a typical suspect. He was out of place and in big trouble in a deeply conservative part of Alabama.

That morning, he’d been driving about 70 miles per hour in a 55 zone when he crossed the center line of a two-lane rural highway. His Ford pickup collided head-on with a Honda Civic, killing the woman behind the wheel. Paramedics took Ruiz to the hospital, where a blood test found a trace amount of alcohol. At just 0.016, it was below the legal threshold for intoxication.

But rather than charging him with manslaughter, which typically would be the most extreme charge brought under the circumstances, police went further. They arrested him for murder.

To support such a murder charge, prosecutors are supposed to show that a defendant’s conduct displays “extreme indifference” — behavior so reckless that someone is likely to die, as when a person fires a gun into a crowd or steers a boat into a group of swimmers. Suspects charged with murder after car crashes often are documented to have blood alcohol levels more than twice the legal limit and 10 times the level found in Ruiz’s blood, according to a review of Alabama cases from the last 20 years by ProPublica. Many others had prior DUIs or were driving 100 miles per hour or more. In this case, the suspect had a clean criminal history and wasn’t even going fast enough to be ticketed for aggravated speeding.

Ruiz’s trial attorney said that as soon as he started talking to the district attorney’s office, the case felt different. Across the three counties in Alabama’s 19th Circuit Court, only a handful of people have been charged with murder for a car accident in the span of a decade — and most wound up taking a plea deal for a lesser charge.

But this time around, the prosecutor’s offer could hardly be considered a deal at all: The teenager would have to plead guilty to murder, and it would be blind plea, meaning he would have to hope for mercy from the court in his sentencing. “In my 30 years of practicing law, I have never been offered a deal like that,” Ruiz’s court-appointed lawyer, Richard Lively, said.

The lead prosecutor eventually budged, but only a little. He wouldn’t reduce the charge, but he would recommend that the teenager spend 30 years in prison.

That’s longer than any other sentence handed down since at least 2004 for a car crash fatality in Alabama’s 19th Circuit Court, which includes Autauga, Chilton and Elmore counties. A man who fled the scene of a fatal crash — and had a 0.09 blood alcohol level nine hours later — received a 15-year sentence in 2017. A woman who had three times the legal limit of alcohol in her system received 23 years in 2007 after she killed a University of Alabama student.

For defendants who were teenagers when they caused fatal car accidents, the courts can be even more lenient. In 2012, a Madison County judge granted youthful offender status to a man who was 19 when he was charged with murder for a drunk driving crash that killed a high school sophomore in Huntsville. The driver, who had a blood alcohol level of 0.15, was sentenced to a year in jail and two on probation.

Lively had a hard time squaring his client’s charges with the results of his blood test and recorded speed. Alabama’s murder statute does not require a driver to be legally intoxicated, and people have faced murder charges for killing someone by racing or fleeing police. But neither applied here. Lively reasoned that for murder to fit, the teenager would have had to be intentionally driving into oncoming traffic.

He thought his client could beat the charge and told him not to plead guilty. Years later, attorneys involved in the case would attempt to shed light on what was so different about it — and on one fact in particular that they believed eclipsed all the others.

He was a Mexican immigrant.

The case against Ruiz was, as one legal expert put it, “a perfect storm of horrible facts.”

The night before the accident, he stayed up late after drinking at a music festival in Birmingham. At the scene of the crash, police found beer cans in his truck. He was in the country on a temporary work visa and did not have a driver’s license. He spoke little English, relying on his 17-year-old cousin to translate his Miranda rights and the string of questions from police.

The only reason Ruiz was in Autauga County was to visit his extended family after finishing a monthslong job in Georgia and South Carolina clearing brush from power lines. He was days away from returning to Mexico.

The woman he killed was named Marlena Hayes. She was a 29-year-old nurse who’d just finished the night shift at Prattville Baptist Hospital. She wasn’t even supposed to be working at that time. She’d planned to see her brother perform that weekend with the marching band at the University of West Alabama. In the end, though, she took the shift as a favor to a colleague.

Newspapers and TV stations in central Alabama quickly picked up the story. Some referred to Ruiz as an illegal immigrant even though he’d been in the U.S. on a six-month H-2B visa, which are approved when employers can’t find enough American workers. One of those articles appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser, the largest newspaper in the area.

When Lively was assigned to the case, he felt compelled to show that his client had been in the U.S. legally. Ruiz’s visa had only lapsed when he was in jail. Lively tracked down the Montgomery Advertiser reporter at the Autauga County courthouse to show him that Ruiz’s visa had been valid when he was arrested. But even after that, the newspaper failed to acknowledge that he was in the country legally at the time of the crash. “The Montgomery Advertiser stands behind our reporting,” the newspaper said in a statement released through its parent company, Gannett.

In the years leading up to Ruiz’s arrest, Alabama had established itself as a particularly unwelcoming place for foreigners. In 2011, then-Gov. Robert Bentley signed a bill that criminalized everyday activities like transporting, employing and renting homes to undocumented immigrants.

At the time, historians and legal experts worried the law could usher in a new era of racial injustice similar to Jim Crow that would be enforced by the police and courts. But the impact of the immigration law remains largely unknown because Alabama prisons don’t collect ethnicity data and therefore don’t know how many inmates are Hispanic. In 2013, the state agreed not to enforce most of the provisions as part of a lawsuit.

“The HB 56 legislation brought nativism and xenophobia into the political mainstream in Alabama” wrote historian Raymond Mohl. At the height of the debate over the law, a congressman from north Alabama said that to prevent illegal immigration to the state, he would do “anything short of shooting them.”

Back then, those harsh policies made Alabama an outlier. But with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the state’s positions started going mainstream. Alabama even supplied one of the foremost architects of Trump’s first-term immigration policy: U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, a fierce champion of border crackdowns, was tapped to be Trump’s attorney general.

Ruiz was arrested nearly two years into Trump’s first term. At the time, Alabama was growing more red even as a blue wave nationally elected dozens of Democrats to Congress. In Alabama, Republicans swept statewide office that year and expanded their majority in the Legislature.

Some members of Ruiz’s extended family had started moving to Alabama from Mexico nearly 15 years earlier and stayed in the area even after the political winds turned against them. Sandra Ruiz, his 17-year-old cousin, moved from Texas to Autauga County at age 2 and had lived near Prattville, a suburb of Montgomery, nearly all her life. She knew that some of her neighbors could be ignorant of, or even hostile to, people from Mexico. She and her family were afraid for Jorge Ruiz when he was arrested and followed the police to the station. Investigators allowed the high school senior to translate their questions and Ruiz’s responses.

A judge granted Ruiz bond in March 2019, four months after he was jailed. Ruiz’s family members in Alabama sold tamales and organized a raffle of an ornate belt buckle to raise funds for bail. They posted the money to free him.

And they began to wait.

In the weeks and months leading up to Ruiz’s trial, Judge Bill Lewis made several decisions that, according to Ruiz’s lawyer, put his client at a disadvantage.

One of the first things Lewis did was revoke Ruiz’s bond. Because of a technicality, Ruiz’s family never recovered the $5,000 they’d paid to get him out of jail. The news coverage that followed the decision sparked intense, and often misinformed, debate online about the case, and Lively worried that bias would affect potential jurors. Not long after Ruiz’s bond was revoked, the judge got a letter in the mail from a local resident. The writer thanked him and asked Lewis to “do everything in your power to get justice for Marlena.” The letter went on to describe Ruiz as “in this country illegally” and “operating his vehicle under the influence of alcohol.”

About a week later, Lewis denied Ruiz’s application for youthful offender status. That meant he would not be eligible for a sentence capped at three years. Lewis did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica, including one about not granting Ruiz youthful offender status.

But as the trial neared, Lewis took several steps to attempt to keep bias out of the courtroom. He gave special instructions to the prosecution and the defense, barring any mention of Ruiz’s immigration status and directing attorneys involved in the case to call him “George.”

The judge’s efforts couldn’t erase the obvious difference between Ruiz and almost everyone else in the courtroom: the language barrier. “Longtime courthouse observers don’t recall a case in Prattville where an interpreter was used at trial,” the Montgomery Advertiser reported.

The district attorney had charged Ruiz under the reckless murder section of the statute, reserved for offenders who unintentionally cause a death. Courts have found that driving without a license, a misdemeanor that in Alabama carries a fine of $10 to $100, doesn’t constitute underlying recklessness for charges like manslaughter or murder. Prosecutors only briefly brought up at Ruiz’s trial that he did not have a license. What made the case amount to murder, the prosecutor said throughout the case, was that Ruiz was both speeding and had crossed the center line.

Ruiz’s use of alcohol also played a central role in the trial, even though he hadn’t been charged with DUI — and even though the prosecutors conceded that the evidence didn’t support that charge. A toxicologist testified that almost four hours had passed between the crash and the blood test at the hospital. He said the average elimination rate for alcohol is 0.015 percentage points an hour. That testimony suggested Ruiz’s blood alcohol level would have been higher than 0.07 at the time of the accident.

If the prosecutors could scientifically confirm that figure, it would have been enough to charge Ruiz with DUI because the legal intoxication threshold is lower for underage drivers. But such estimates have been described as unreliable by some scientists and legal experts, with one calling them no better than a “wild guess.” Some states have imposed higher bars than Alabama for the admission of such evidence, and at least one, Massachusetts, doesn’t allow it at all if the blood alcohol reading was, like Ruiz’s, below 0.03.

Lively produced no expert to dispute the toxicologist. In fact, he called only one witness, Ruiz’s date the night of the festival, who testified that Ruiz rode with her to her apartment after the festival, at around 1:30 a.m., and slept on the couch until he left at around 5 a.m.

Lively said in his closing argument that the evidence failed to show that Ruiz’s behavior was so brazenly dangerous that it amounted to murder.

“This was a person who was driving home and fell asleep behind the wheel,” Lively said.

Then-Chief Assistant District Attorney C.J. Robinson said there was no evidence Ruiz fell asleep. “In Alabama, we recognize that you can do something so dangerous that it could kill somebody, and you should realize what you’re doing is that dangerous,” he said during closing arguments. “I submit to you that anyone’s life was in danger, and therefore it was reckless murder.”

Jurors were instructed that, as an alternative to murder, they also could consider the lesser charges of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. They deliberated for less than an hour.

The foreman announced guilty verdicts on three counts: minor in possession of alcohol, driving without a license and murder.

Three weeks later, everyone gathered again for the sentencing. Robinson invited members of Hayes’ family to speak about their loss.

The family, along with friends, had come to every hearing. Hayes’ mother, Laura Liveoak, had spoken out on social media about her grief, describing how her daughter had texted her right before she left work that morning, asking what the weather was like. Liveoak said in a Facebook video: “It’s hard to be the parent of a victim, knowing that she’ll never be a mother. I’ll never be a grandmother to the sweet little redheaded kids that she probably would have had.” She declined to comment for this story.

Liveoak told the judge how much her daughter loved being a nurse: so much that she spent some of her days off visiting patients. She’d recently bought a house in a nearby town, Deatsville, and adopted two German shepherds who became the center of her world. She’d texted her mom right before she left work that morning. Her last message was about her dogs.

Then it was Ruiz’s turn. He spoke for the first time in court.

“I want to say that I am sorry to the family,” Ruiz said. “I wouldn’t have wished for this to happen. I wish that this would have only been a dream.”

Lewis peered down from the bench at Ruiz.

“This is America,” Lewis said. “It’s the greatest country in the world and we have the right to trial in this country. I would never penalize you for exercising that right, but Mr. Lively talked about acceptance of responsibility, contrition, remorse. I haven’t seen any of that from you.”

He sentenced Ruiz to the maximum possible punishment, longer even than the 50 years requested by prosecutors: 99 years.

The court went quiet. Even the prosecutor was shocked.

Years later, Robinson remembered that moment. “That was not something that I had expected,” he said.

In 2023, four years after the sentencing, a human rights lawyer from Mexico reached out to the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit law center in Atlanta that focuses on criminal justice. He let them know that the Mexican Consulate had been following Ruiz’s case from the time he was arrested through the slow-moving appeals process. His 99-year sentence had shocked them, and they wanted to find a lawyer in the U.S. who could steer the increasingly complicated appeal.

Ruiz’s family had cobbled together money for a private attorney, who filed motions to challenge his conviction and sentence. But they had run out of funds. Ruiz was preparing to represent himself when the attorneys from the center stepped in.

“I was like, ‘We need to help this kid,’” SCHR attorney Paulina Lucio-Maymon said. “Otherwise, he’s just gonna end up forgotten by the system.”

The Mexican Consulate connected Lucio-Maymon and her colleague Michael Admirand with family from Prattville, who in turn connected the attorneys with family in Ruiz’s hometown, José María Pino Suárez, in the Mexican state of Durango. Many in the small community knew Ruiz. As a young boy, he had helped his grandfather work a shared plot of farmland and manage his livestock. He dropped out after middle school to support his family and got his visa to come to the U.S. in the spring of 2018. He needed to make more money after his mother’s unexpected death.

“He was always trying to make sure everyone was taken care of,” said his cousin, Sandra Ruiz.

In the U.S., he was part of an all-immigrant crew of temporary visa workers employed by a contractor for the power company. The team trudged through Georgia and South Carolina backcountry, their feet snagging on roots and vines as they cleared vegetation from power lines. They often walked for 10 to 12 hours a day while carrying heavy canisters of weed-killing chemicals, and Ruiz suffered heat stroke twice, one of Ruiz’s fellow workers testified in an appeal hearing. Workers wore out their shoes every eight days, the worker said.

Ruiz wanted to spend his last few weeks in the U.S. visiting family in Prattville before returning to Mexico. He missed his daughter, Noeli, and had begun making plans for her third birthday.

None of that history had been presented at his sentencing hearing. His attorney also failed to highlight his clean criminal record in Mexico.

In September 2019, less than a month after he handed down that 99-year sentence, Lewis had issued an unusual order. He removed Lively from the case despite there being no motion seeking his removal. Lewis determined Ruiz had received inadequate representation.

Lewis cited an offhand comment Lively made at the sentencing hearing. In response to the judge admonishing Ruiz for not being contrite, Lively told the judge that the decision to take Ruiz’s case to trial “may be more of a reflection of my bad advice to him than his own acceptance of responsibility.” Lewis wrote that he saw that as an admission that Lively was questioning his own representation of Ruiz. (Lively later told ProPublica he was trying to “deflect some of Judge Lewis’ criticism of Jorge onto me” and lamented how “that one sentence has been used as a cudgel against me and a tool to scapegoat me in this case.”)

In the hearings and filings that followed, Lewis continued to express concerns about the information that had not been presented at trial or sentencing.

“The Court, when rendering a sentence in this case should have as much information as possible,” Lewis wrote in a more recent order. “Mr. Lively failed to provide any, despite having access to many different sources of information that could have affected the Defendant’s sentence.”

Lively did provide some evidence at Ruiz’s sentencing, calling his aunt and cousin to testify. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals later rejected a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel against him.

In a statement to ProPublica, Lively wrote that he believed he competently defended Ruiz. He said that he only called one trial witness because he felt the state had not proven his client’s guilt. He pointed to the state’s experts, who testified that Ruiz had a very low level of alcohol in his system and drifted slowly into oncoming traffic, which, according to Lively, showed Ruiz did not intentionally jerk the car across the center line. “The most powerful witness is one that is called by the opposition who proves your case,” Lively wrote.

He also described the case as “the most traumatic” he’s encountered in his 30 years as an attorney. “I have made the law my life’s work, and Jorge’s case caused me to question almost everything I believed about the legal system,” he wrote.

When Lucio-Maymon and Admirand first took on Ruiz’s case, they appealed both his murder conviction and his 99-year sentence. Lewis rejected their challenge of Ruiz’s conviction but agreed the sentence deserved another look.

To make their case for a shorter sentence, Ruiz’s attorneys compiled information about other fatal car crash cases. His former attorneys had appealed his conviction to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and lost. The one notable dissent on the panel of judges was penned by Republican Judge J. William Cole, who wrote that the facts did not support a murder conviction.

“Ruiz had consumed alcohol before the accident, but he was not determined to be legally intoxicated, nor was he charged with driving under the influence of alcohol,” Cole wrote. “Although he crossed to the wrong side of the road, there was no evidence that he was racing or driving in a grossly wanton manner.”

Admirand and Lucio-Maymon looked at the four cases cited in the decision to uphold his conviction. The drivers in those cases had blood alcohol levels that ranged from 0.16 to 0.3 — from double to nearly quadruple the level of criminal intoxication. Their sentences ranged from 12 to 25 years in prison.

The attorneys created a simple graph that compared those sentences and blood alcohol levels. Although Ruiz had the lowest amount of alcohol in his system, his sentence was by far the longest.

After Lewis granted a new sentencing hearing, Admirand and Lucio-Maymon felt hopeful. That disparity — along with testimony from Ruiz’s friends and family in Mexico — could help sway the judge toward mercy, they believed. They said they even started talking with the district attorney’s office with the goal of making a deal, though Robinson said he remembered those conversations differently. He recalled that he agreed to listen to evidence about Ruiz’s background but wouldn’t consider reducing the charge and would be hard-pressed to recommend less than 50 years.

“They did initially express some openness to discussion in this case,” Admirand said. “And then something changed.”

Although Lewis had presided over Ruiz’s trial and granted him a resentencing hearing, he was not behind the bench when Ruiz was set to be resentenced in 2024. By then, Lewis had been appointed to the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals.

The case was transferred to Sibley Reynolds, who had retired from the bench but still took cases as needed. When Admirand and Lucio-Maymon arrived early on Aug. 14, 2024, to prepare, they found the judge sitting in the courtroom, paging through a purple binder they had never seen before. It contained pictures of Hayes and letters from friends, family members and even a few local officials.

Each of the dozens of letters urged the judge to uphold Ruiz’s 99-year sentence. Prosecutors asked the judge for 50 years. Lucio-Maymon and Admirand, citing several sentences from cases across the 19th Circuit Court, were seeking 10 years.

Admirand said he watched as Reynolds carried the binder with him to the bench. The hearing he oversaw was short but eventful. At one point, Ruiz addressed Hayes’ family.

“I am profoundly sorry for having caused you this pain,” he said. “I want to say I’m sorry or forgive me, the way I have asked God to do every day during the almost six years.”

Admirand presented all the evidence he believed had been missing from Ruiz’s first sentencing hearing in 2019. He told the judge about the cases they had found in the same judicial district with sentences that ranged from one to 25 years. And he presented mitigating factors — witnesses who testified about Ruiz’s character and work ethic.

His attorneys also played a series of videos of family members in Mexico, accompanied by dramatic music.

When Robinson, who had been elected district attorney in 2022, started to make his argument against Ruiz, he invoked a patriotic anthem as a sort of rebuttal. He said the victim’s family was ready to move on and that he was going to make a case for them “courtesy of the red, white and blue.”

It was a reference to the title of the Toby Keith song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” which includes lyrics like, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” Robinson would later tell ProPublica the comment was taken out of context and was meant as a critique of the music in the video, which he described as “manipulative.”

Shortly after, Hayes’ mother asked the judge to uphold the original sentence.

“I’m asking for the 99 years that Judge Lewis saw fit to give,” she said. “Marlena’s life is worth that and so much more.”

At the end of the hearing, the judge announced his decision: He would reduce Ruiz’s sentence to 50 years.

He didn’t offer an explanation for why he chose what’s still an unusually long sentence. Admirand suspected the reason might be found in the purple binder. He objected to the judge considering it without the defense having seen it. He then asked for a copy of the material.

“I mean, it’s literally letters from the victim’s family,” said Assistant District Attorney Mandy Johnson in response to the objection.

When Admirand read it right after the hearing, he found much more than that, including notes from local public officials and incorrect information about the case. He said that, more alarmingly, there were letters that included language he considered biased. One letter said that if Ruiz was released early and deported, he would surely return to the U.S.

“He will again commit crimes,” the letter said. “He will again be a draw on our judicial system and society itself. He will once again be an unnecessary threat to all our lives, including yours.”

“Fry him!” demanded another one.

The binder presented an opportunity to challenge what Admirand had come to believe was an underlying bias that permeated the case from the first moments after the crash, when a state trooper threatened to take Ruiz to jail if he did not speak English. In September 2024, he and Lucio-Maymon filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that the letters contained improper references to Ruiz’s nationality, including racially derogatory claims. In February, the Mexican Consulate filed an amicus brief in support of the appeal, only the second time in five years it has done that in a criminal case in the United States.

“Ruiz’s equal protection rights were violated from the moment this prosecution began,” the appeal said. “From his earliest interactions with law enforcement through the resentencing proceedings, Ruiz was treated more harshly than other similarly situated defendants because of his race. The Court should remedy this injustice.”

In June, Ruiz’s attorneys identified another 17 car crash cases over 15 years that were heard in the 19th Circuit Court. Most defendants received sentences of less than 15 years in prison, even in cases involving multiple fatalities or high blood alcohol levels. Only one, Ruiz, had a sentence longer than 25 years. Robinson argued those cases were different, though not because of the defendant’s race. Defendants in most of them had accepted plea deals. He did not acknowledge that all of those plea deals were more lenient than the one offered to Ruiz.

Lewis did not respond to questions, including ones about alleged bias in the case. In response to ProPublica’s questions, Robinson wrote that neither he nor the district attorney’s office “treated Jorge Ruiz more harshly than other similarly situated defendants because of his race.”

Though the district attorney’s office did not charge Ruiz with DUI, Robinson wrote that alcohol “was illegally consumed at a rate much higher than legally permissible for Ruiz to be operating a vehicle.” He also wrote, “I do not assess cases using a least common denominator approach. I do my best to evaluate them based on a totality of the circumstances approach.”

In August, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals asked for more information from Reynolds about his reasoning behind the 50-year sentence. Admirand and Lucio-Maymon have asked the court to take Reynolds off the case, arguing that he improperly reviewed the purple binder material. Reynolds did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Hayes’ family members have been outspoken about their loss. At every hearing, they tick off the milestones Hayes has missed. Her brother’s graduation. Her sister’s wedding. The births of nieces and nephews.

Ruiz’s family members are quietly marking off their own list. His daughter’s kindergarten graduation, her First Communion. The 9-year-old still doesn’t quite comprehend where he has gone.

Ruiz has learned a little English but still struggles with the language. He said through his attorneys that he’s never been able to adequately convey how bad he feels about the accident. It’s not just the language barrier, but also that his role in Hayes’ death left him so distraught that he felt like “my life didn’t matter anymore.”

Still, the hearing last year that reduced his sentence kindled some optimism. He said that when he first faced the prospect of 99 years behind bars, the only thing he could think about was never seeing his daughter again. After the hearing, his outlook changed.

“That gave me back hope that one day I’ll be able to see my family again,” Ruiz said.