It's hard to know where to start talking about former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. She's a fixture on MS Now, and she's been on PBS's Overheard with Evan Smith. The midterm elections are also just a few weeks away, and Vance is out with a new book titled "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy.” Bear with me; I'm just getting warmed up. 2026 is also the 30th anniversary of the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. Vance helped build the legal case against bomber Eric Rudolph after a similar attack in Birmingham. We'll start off by talking about her connection to a national award-winning investigation right here at Alabama Public Radio. All of that and more on APR Notebook.
PAT DUGGINS-- Joyce Vance, thank you so much for talking to me.
JOYCE VANCE-- Thank you so much for having me.
PAT-- We'll spend a lot of time talking about your new book, "Giving Up Is Unforgivable,” but I wanted to start off with a walk down memory lane. A lot of Alabama Public Radio listeners first heard from you during our investigation into prison reform. Now, your U.S. Attorney's office at the time, I believe, was one of three that was recognized by the White House for programs to keep ex-cons from reoffending and winding up behind bars. Now, I'm not an expert in the law, but it seems as though prosecutors put bad guys away. Why was it a priority for you to have a program to keep them out?
VANCE-- Right. I mean, isn't that interesting? Because I'm a career prosecutor, and I took the U.S. attorney's job thinking my role is to put people in prison to protect my community, and I learned through exposure to to data, to hard science, and to numbers about what made communities safer. That prosecutions were important, but they were only one leg of a three-legged stool. That it was important to work on prevention, and that it was important to work on on recidivism, people being released from prison, making sure that they didn't commit new crimes, and it was only if you worked on all three of those aspects of the problem that you could protect your community. So, I had to do a rapid sort of a perspective alteration, and it has left me believing that it's incredibly important for law enforcement to be data informed, so that you're not just doing what sounds good or what feels good or what appeals to somebody's political desires. You're doing what works for your community and spending taxpayer dollars effectively.
PAT -- One idea that you pushed was called "ban the box, which kept employees from asking on an employment form if an ex-con was an ex-con. How tough a sell was that?
VANCE-- You know, so this is really interesting. The idea here behind banning the box is that when people are first applying for jobs, you don't ask them at that entry level, "Have you ever been convicted of a felony? and then screen them out if they have been. You don't ask that until later in the interview process, so that if you find somebody you like who does have an old felony conviction, then you can contemplate what's the right kind of job for this person. Maybe you don't have the confidence level to send them out to install, you know, air conditioning in somebody's home, but perhaps you're willing to put them working in a desk job. Alabama Power thought that that was a good opportunity for them to replace their lineman population when they were aging out. And look, the reality is this. And as a prosecutor, I had to bust through this too. We have a lot of preconceptions, misconceptions about people who have been in prison, many of them come out hoping that they'll be able to find a good job, reconnect with their families, and these are people who become excellent employees if they're given a second chance. And because the labor market is shrinking, and in many places it's hard to find employees. There's a certain marriage of convenience here between what these people want to do to rehabilitate their lives and what employers need, so that they'll have enough people to run their businesses. It's causing us to to live our values and to give people a second chance to prove themselves.
PAT-- In your book, giving up is unforgivable. I'm reminded of a quote from Michelle Obama, who said that democracy doesn't work if you vote only once in a while. Now, in your book, you you zeroed in on the reported 30% of voters during the last presidential election who reportedly did not cast ballots. They stayed at home in 2024. Can you talk about your feelings and your message?
VANCE-- Well, well. Look, I think that if you're going to be a citizen in the United States, you have a certain level of responsibility for engaging in that democratic process, and maybe our key responsibility is to educate ourselves about candidates in advance of elections, and then make selections based on what we learn. You know, my husband Bob is a now retired county judge, and in advance of every election, we have a steady stream of friends and neighbors knocking on the door, saying, "Bob, sit down with me, talk with me. You know about this ballot, about the judges, because very often people don't know anything about the judges who are on the ballot, unfortunately, except for the R and the D after their name, since in Alabama, we we run judges by party, and I've overheard Bob having many conversations with people explaining the background of different candidates and talking about you know what they've done. He's very careful to not ever say vote for this person, but he'll talk about many of the judges who he knows, and something that I think is an important ticket, sort of an important takeaway on this is in Alabama we can pull the lever, right? You can vote a single party slate. You just tick the box. You vote for all the Democrats or all the Republicans on the ballot. I think democracy demands far more subtlety and engagement out of us than that, and I try for every race and every measure that's on the ballot to educate myself on the merits of the candidates or the measure, and to vote accordingly.
PAT-- We work with student journalists here at the University of Alabama at APR in the newsroom, and the notion of voting and being politically active comes up, and the one thing that I keep hearing is that civics really does not seem to be like a priority in in the school system. How do you change that?
VANCE-- You know, it's a great question. I I write about it a little bit in my book, and I'll tell you. I mean, for so many students, so I teach a class on democratic institutions every spring, and every year I have a student who comes in and says some variation of. In fourth grade, I took civics, and my teacher taught us about the Constitution, and I was hooked right there. That's why I'm in law school, and I love those stories because I think teachers are some of America's great unsung heroes. You know, these elementary school teachers who make us who we are in large part, but but we have to do more than we've been doing. Every American should have a working understanding of the Constitution and what it provides and what it protects, and more importantly, we should understand and embrace our role as citizens because the founding fathers did not expect us to sit on the sidelines and let our elected officials play the ball game for us. We're supposed to actively pay attention to what our elected officials are doing, to meet with them. Sometimes that can be difficult, and you have to demand those meetings. But that's our job to let them know what we think, what we want, and sure, look, we're all busy people. We've got busy lives, and we have a lot of demands and responsibilities on us. But if we want to have a functioning constitutional republic, then we have to take more ownership in it.
PAT-- Getting back to that 30% that sat out the last presidential election, I think it's easy to for people to think, okay, well, that that was because of Donald Trump, and it was because of Kamala Harris. And I did some reading around, and I noticed, for example, on the website for USA Facts, they say that happens all the time with presidential elections, not just the most recent one. What do you do about that?
VANCE-- You know, if anything, people have been more engaged in these last few elections. Off-year elections usually have just abysmally low voter turnout. This one, more people seem to be paying attention, and so I think many people are taking the message that they need to pay more attention to not just who you know who the president is is something many people will pay attention to. Who your mayor is that probably matters a lot more for your everyday life. It determines does your garbage get picked up on time, right? Are your are your city parks well maintained? And so, increasingly, I hope that Americans will appreciate these municipal, county, state elections and and their importance. The reality is, we have low voter turnout in this country. In part, that can be because it's difficult to vote. If you live in a state like Alabama, right? Tuesday voting, the old farmers' market day, it used to be convenient in the 17 and the 1800s. Not so much if you're a single mom who's a waitress, and if you're not at work, you don't get paid, right? It can be very difficult to vote, and so hopefully, you know, we had this very successful experiment in in Alabama during COVID. I know it's not popular everywhere, but we learned that mail-in voting was successful, that it increased voter turnout, that there were no problems with fraud, although there's a lot of talk about that. That was not the case. And hopefully we'll adopt this view. You know, I'm I'm always reminded. I tell this story in my book of this great bet between Angus King, who's now one of the state senators in Maine when he was the governor, and Jesse Ventura, who many people will be familiar with from wrestling when he was the governor of Minnesota, and those two governors had this standing bet about which state could have higher voter turnout, and at one point Angus King, who told me the story, said, "You know, people were sort of like, you know, if you encourage a lot of turnout, all of those people may not vote for you. But I think the point is for our candidates, right? If if you're the governor or a senator or a president, you should want as many eligible Americans as possible to vote, and then it's up to you to compete for their vote in the marketplace of ideas. So there are two things going on here at once. One is that every American citizen has the right to vote, and it should be easy for them to do that. And at the same time, who you vote for? That's a political act, and it's up to politicians to convince you to vote for them.
PAT-- I've heard some folks say, "Why not make Election Day a federal holiday? I've heard some folks say, "Why not make Election Day on a Saturday? Snowball's chance of either-you know. Probably no chance of change right now.
VANCE-- And and look, every day is difficult. I mean, if you're Jewish, voting on a Saturday probably doesn't work out so well for you, right? And so that's why states where there's two weeks of early voting will have better turnout, or states where you can mail in your ballot or use drop-off. And you know, there's been long-term conversation about election fraud or voter fraud, but every study, every statistic that's been done suggests that that simply is not something that's influencing the outcome of our elections following the 2020 election. Over 100 judges, including judges appointed by Donald Trump, rejected the idea that fraud had been involved in the outcome of that election, and so we have to learn here to balance our concerns about citizens exercising their rights with whatever evidence people can muster of fraud. I'll just say I'm not particularly compelled by by that. You know, Alan King, who some people will remember, Alan was a Jefferson County probate judge, a Democrat, and in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected the first time, he had a voter. I'm probably butchering the name, but I think it was a voter integrity commission consisting of people like Judge King from all over the country, and so Judge King was a part of it, and he went in really promoting ideas around giving counties the resources that they needed to have secure elections, right? Standalone systems that weren't online to protect the integrity of the votes, enough money to advance check-in proceedings at polling places, and the funny thing was that that commission was looking for evidence of voter fraud, and it just couldn't find it. And four months into its work, it folded. Unfortunately, Judge King's recommendations sort of died on the vine along with that process. But maybe the hope here should be that we should do more to ressource our elections, make it easy for eligible Americans to work, and follow the evidence which says voter fraud is not a problem.
PAT -- On the subject of being more politically active, I've I've covered No King's protests here in Tuscaloosa, and there are just as many people who will pick up signs in March and say that they like what what what Donald Trump is doing. In your book, you wrote about a specific exchange that you had with your own son about whether or not demonstration actually works to bring about political change, can you talk about that?
VANCE-- Yeah. So my sweet fourth child, who's really aghast because I also talked about him on NPR on on Fresh Air, and he learned that all of his friends listened to Fresh Air because they were all like, "Ollie, your mom talked about you. Yeah. So I was persona non grata for a while, but you know, young people don't vote in significant numbers, and this is something that politicians of all stripes bemoan. If only the 18 to 25 year olds would vote, you know, so and so could win an election. And I asked Ollie, I was like, "Look, dude, you know why? Why do you guys not vote? And he, of course, fired back and said, "Mom, I vote. I vote in every election. My friends vote in every election. Okay, they're a little bit unusual in that regard, I think. But regardless, the point he made to me that was so solid was that it was unfair to ask 20-year-olds to protect, in essence, democracy. And the point he made was that he remembered the Occupy protests, that he was like six or eight years old when the Occupy protests had happened, and that nothing had really changed, and that 20-year-old kids could not stand up to billionaires who had injected themselves into the political process. His takeaway was: there's nothing that we can do about. My takeaway, you know, and and a conversation that he and I have had on an ongoing basis was, you're getting to inherit this imperfect system. And look, that's no criticism of American democracy. The founding fathers meant for us to be aspirational. We always have more that we can do to expand the promise of of American success to more people, but the whole point is you have to stay engaged. You have to keep working. You have to keep fighting for what you believe in. So many people in his age group have given up because they believe that the duck is stacked against them. And my hope is that maybe something that our flawed, faulty older generation can do is share our knowledge about the process and how it works with them, and empower them to to make it their own.
PAT-- I'm Pat Duggins, and you're listening to the national award-winning APR Notebook on Alabama Public Radio. My guest is former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. She's also author of the book "Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy. We talked earlier about her work as a U.S. attorney in Alabama. My next question dealt with how a personal tragedy in her family helped lead to that part of her career. Her father-in-law was federal appeals court judge Robert Smith Vance? He was killed in 1989 by a mail bomb.
VANCE-- Um. Yeah. So you know, I loved my father-in-law. He was a wonderful person. He wasn't just a federal judge. He was a gardener. He was the guy who cooked Sunday night dinner, and and the guy who constantly told me he wanted grandchildren. One of the sorrows of my life is that he didn't get to live to see his four gorgeous grandchildren, actually five, because my brother-in-law has a beautiful daughter too. And so, when Pop was killed, which obviously was a really horrible experience, something that helped my mother-in-law so much was what a tremendous job the Justice Department prosecutors did of prosecuting the case, and they they really went above and beyond. Louis Free, who went on to become a federal judge and an FBI director, ironically was at the time a line prosecutor who was brought down here to work on the case, and Bob, my husband, and I were so grateful for what the Justice Department did for Mom that we really felt like one of us needed to commit to public service to pay that forward, and I was at a good point career-wise to to do that, and so I thought I was just going to the Justice Department for a couple of years to be, you know, really to pay that debt and and be a public servant. But I loved it, and I never left. And I like to think that that would have tickled my father-in-law.
PAT -- 2026 also is 30 years since the Centennial Park bombing in the 1996 Olympic Games and bomber Eric Rudolph, you know, he was involved in more than that. There was the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic that also killed an off-duty policeman. So, you know, bringing everything a little bit full circle, there you were involved in that prosecution. Was that sort of like you know helping to pay that debt, or just another day, another day at work for you?
VANCE-- You know, somehow or another, I ended up as the expert in our office on arsons. I guess, and it really was very random. I was the duty AUSA (Assistant U.S. Attorney,) the person that everybody calls for a week with new cases when the three church fires in Greene County, Alabama, happened, and so I inherited those cases, which became part of the National Church arson task force, and at some point was sent to the federal law enforcement training center in Savannah, Georgia, for training on arsons, which are pretty specialized investigations and prosecutions. And in the federal system, arson laws and bomb laws are packaged together and and are very similar. And so part of arsons training was bomb training, which meant that when that explosion happened, I was someone who happened to be trained in our office. So it was really just happenstance that I worked on the Eric Rudolph case during the investigation.
PAT-- So I want to make sure I get my timeline right here. Now you received training from the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Agency on how to make a bomb. Now was that around the Rudolph case, or before, or after? How did that work?
VANCE-- Let me think. When that was, it would have been before, because the arsons and explosives training that I did was in connection with the Church Fires Task Force.
PAT-- Okay, and I've heard other interviews of some of your colleagues saying that, man, if there's anybody who knows how to make a bomb? It's Joyce. I mean, was that kind of your reputation around the office?
VANCE-- That I would go that far, but I knew how to investigate an arson, or I knew how to investigate a bombing, and I did understand the component elements of an improvised explosive device long before you know that that term was never used until the Iraq War, and then IED became something. That we were all familiar with. Before that, that was just something that only geeky law enforcement and military folks talked about.
PAT-- Chicken and egg question. Then I mean, you know, putting together a bomb, which I have never done before, sounds like a very you know intricate, hands-on kind of a thing. What was it? Your interest in knitting that made that easier, or did it prompt your interest in anything that you took took up later on.
VANCE-- You know what what made me interested in the subject matter area was a really extraordinary ATF agent named Lloyd Irwin, who was you know even when I was a young prosecutor had just decades of experience, and Lloyd had worked on so many bombing cases that he just had encyclopedic knowledge of components that people used, where they could be purchased, what a functioning device looked like, and he had the ability and the willingness to explain it to young prosecutors because prosecutors aren't agents; they don't do the investigation. You know, we don't put together, for instance, the the models that tell us whether an explosive device worked or how it was intended to function. But we have to be able to explain all of that to a jury. And so, really, if you're a good prosecutor, there's probably an agent or two in your background that you need to thank for training you, for me, he was he was one of them.
PAT-- As we begin to wrap up our talk here, in your book, giving up is is unforgivable. You take a hard line look at the at the U.S. Supreme Court, and there are those who like what the conservative majority is doing. There are those who say it's a little bit too deferential to the current administration. What do you think?
VANCE-- Yeah, you know the court should not be about politics, and the decisions that the court renders should not change depending on the personalities of who's on the court. There have been concerns the last few years that personalities are influencing outcomes, and so it's incumbent on this Supreme Court again to demonstrate its integrity to the public. There have been concerns based on reporting about the integrity of some of the justices. ProPublica and others have reported about justices who have accepted expensive vacations and other gifts from people who have interests in front of the court, and the U.S. Supreme Court, the only judicial entity in the United States that's not subject to an ethics code. Other federal judges, the courts of appeals, and the district judges are accountable to an ethics code, and it's not unusual to see judges who are disciplined by the judicial council. But the Supreme Court has held itself above the fray. There is no accountability. The chief justice has not really taken serious steps towards adopting an ethics code. I think that would be a great first step for this Supreme Court if it's serious about having the confidence of Americans about making sure that we can rely on their decision-making process, then starting by adopting a binding ethics code would be a great step forward.
PAT-- Earlier, we were talking about okay, if we want to fix election day, there's make it a holiday, move it to a Saturday. That's where there there are equal numbers of people who say okay, if you don't like the Supreme Court, expand the number of justices. Practical, impractical. What do you think?
VANCE-- You know, it's a difficult question. What I don't like with the notion of expanding the court is the idea that it would become some kind of a race to the bottom. Democrats would do it, and then Republicans would do it. I'll tell you why I have become persuaded. In some ways, it's sensible. We have nine Supreme Court justices. That's because there used to only be nine geographic circuits in the country. Now there are 11 plus a couple of specialty courts, and with only nine justices, you can't have one justice for every circuit. Which is sort of how this is supposed to work administratively. There is a good argument for taking the court up to 11 justices to accommodate that. If it's done, I hope it will be done in a non-political way. The same about imposing term limits for justices. There's actually some sense to that sort of a proposal. People didn't live as long as they do now. When the founding fathers wrote our brilliant constitution, and so that might be a change that would work. But again, if it was done in a way that gave one party a heavy-handed advantage, that would do nothing but destroy public confidence in the court. And it is so essential because what we do, in essence is we ask the Supreme Court to decide controversies that are so difficult that we can't resolve them among ourselves. We can't even resolve them in the lower courts. These are really the most important dilemmas that individuals and and units of government and and others face. We've got to have confidence. In the decisions the court makes, it does not have an army to enforce its decisions. We need to be able to trust it.
PAT-- My last question before we wrap up here, and authors hate it when I say this, but I'm going to ask anyway. Any idea at all what your next book might be?
VANCE-- Oh golly, you know, I'm fascinated by the First Amendment. I'm fascinated by how it's implemented at the state and local level as well as at the federal level, and you know where you started talking about civics education and and whether or not we do it well in this country. I think something that people like me who've served in government who have the privilege of of teaching the nation's next generation of lawyers, one of our obligations is also to educate the public. The best thing about writing my book turned out to be how many people across the country were willing to read a wonky, you know, a look at the history of cases and the founding fathers and and the Federalist Papers. And I felt like three people will read this book. Right? It's so boring. If you're not a wonky lawyer like me, I loved that people from all walks of life would come up to me and talk about it and say, "I was so excited to read about Marbury versus Madison, or a lot of people were interested in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or stories about the Civil Rights Movement. I have a real passion for that, and I hope I'll have another chance to share that with people.
PAT-- Truth be told, now that I'm now that I'm done with my research for this interview, my copy of "Giving Up is Unforgivable" is now in the hands of Mrs. Duggins because she said she wanted to read it when I got done. So there, there you go.
VANCE—Hope she enjoys it.
PAT-- Oh, I bet you she will. Joyce Vance, author of "Giving Up Is Unforgivable. Thank you so much for talking to me.
VANCE-- Thanks for having me.
PAT-- By the way, coming up next time on APR Notebook. If you ever saw Ken Burns' PBS documentary on the Civil War, then you probably know the music of Bobby Horton of Birmingham. We'll talk about how he got that job, and also how Abraham Lincoln was a fan of the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy, the song we know as Dixie. The
war had just ended, and the Union Army was serenading him on the on the lawn of the White House, and after they'd finished their planned concert, they said, "mr. President, is there anything we can play for?
"Well, it's a song we haven't owned for a long time,” Horton said. “And it's it's I think the the most beautiful songs ever written, and it's called Dixie. Can you play it for me?”
PAT-- Civil War musician Bobby Horton joins me next time on APR Notebook. The now national award-winning APR Notebook is available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. The student interns in the APR Newsroom are Alexis Barone, Bella Steyert, J.D. Kizziah, Caroline Harrington, Caleb Salter, Jamel Jackson, Michael Green, Addison Phelps, Alex Schoenfeld, Matt Moran, and Logan Fitzpatrick. The APR Newsroom is also proud to be working with Lillian Onianwa, a veteran of Radio Nigeria. I'm Pat Duggins. We'll see you next time on APR Notebook.
