Robert Smith Vance
USINFO | 2013-09-30 11:51

 
Robert Smith Vance (May 10, 1931 – December 16, 1989) was a United States federal judge. He is one of the few judges in American history to have been assassinated as the result of his judicial service.

Murder
On December 16, 1989, Vance was killed at his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama when he opened a package containing a mail bomb. Vance was killed instantly and his wife, Helen, was seriously injured. After an intensive investigation, the federal government charged Walter Leroy Moody, Jr. with the murders of Judge Vance and of Robert E. Robinson, a black civil rights attorney in Savannah, Georgia, who had been killed in a separate explosion. Moody was also charged with mailing bombs that were defused at the Eleventh Circuit's headquarters and at the Jacksonville office of the NAACP.

Moody had previously been convicted in 1972 of the possession of a bomb that had exploded in his house. He served four years in federal prison. Prosecutors speculated that Moody's motive for killing Judge Vance was revenge against Vance's court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which had refused to expunge that conviction. Vance himself, however, had not been a member of the panel that considered Moody's earlier case. Following John H. Wood, Jr. and Richard J. Daronco, Vance became the third federal judge in the 20th century to be assassinated as a result of his judicial service.

After an order was entered directing the recusal of all circuit and district judges within the Eleventh Circuit, Moody's trial for murder and related crimes was presided over by Judge Edward J. Devitt of the District of Minnesota. Moody was convicted on all counts.

He was sentenced to seven federal life terms. Subsequently, an Alabama state-court jury convicted Moody of Judge Vance's murder and he was sentenced to death in 1997.[1] He remains on death row at the Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore, Alabama. He entered death row on February 13, 1997.[2] Moody has the Alabama Institutional Serial # 00Z613.[3]
 
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