Alabama Solicitor General Corey L. Maze has been honored by the National Association of Attorneys General with a "Best Brief Award" for 2010.   

The award recognizes excellence in brief writing to the United States Supreme Court and is judged by a panel of leading members of the Supreme Court Bar.  This is Maze’s second consecutive Best Brief Award and marks the fifth time in the last six years that the Alabama attorney general's office has been so honored.  

Attorney General Troy King joined the association in praising Maze’s brief in the capital case of Billy Joe Magwood v. (Warden) Tony Patterson.   

Magwood murdered Coffee County Sheriff Neil Grantham on March 1, 1979 and was convicted and sentenced to death in 1981. Three days before his scheduled 1983 execution, Magwood petitioned a federal court to stay his death sentence and grant him a new sentencing hearing. In 1986, the federal court granted Magwood’s request for a new sentencing hearing, and Magwood was again sentenced to death later that year. For the past 13 years, Magwood has challenged the re-imposed death sentence in the same federal courts. 

The issue before the Supreme Court is whether, under federal law (“AEDPA”), Magwood was required to argue that he did not have “fair warning” that murdering a sheriff was a death-eligible offense in his first federal petition (1983), or whether Magwood could raise the fair warning claim in his second federal petition (1997), which challenged his re-imposed death sentence for the first time.

Contending that Magwood was barred from raising the previously available claim in his second petition, Maze argued in his brief that “the door closed on Magwood’s fair-warning claim when his first petition was adjudicated in 1986[.]   AEDPA serves as the door’s lock, not its key.”   

Noting the decades-long appeals process in death penalty cases, Maze argued to the Court that the optimal rule for defendants, the state, and victims’ families is to give defendants, “one, but only one, full and fair opportunity to litigate a claim” because, regardless of the outcome in the first proceeding, “[e]ither way, the parties would have closure.”   

Maze orally argued the Magwood case before the Supreme Court on March 24, 2010.  The Court will issue its decision later this month. 

As solicitor general, Maze oversees the state’s appellate litigation in state and federal courts.  He is a 2003 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., and joined the attorney general’s office the same year.  Maze became Alabama’s third solicitor general in August 2008.