[1] Vance clerked for Judge Thomas Gibbs Gee on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit before starting work at the Birmingham law firm Johnston, Barton, Proctor and Powell as a litigator.

[4] He reluctantly entered the race in August 2012, after the former Democratic candidate Harry Lyon was disqualified from the ballot in large part due to erratic behavior and rants against gays and lesbians.

He was assassinated on December 16, 1989, at his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama, when he opened a package containing a mail bomb sent by serial bomber Walter Leroy Moody, Jr. Vance was killed instantly and Bob's mother, Helen, was seriously injured and hospitalized.

The federal government charged Moody 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 at his office.

Moody was also charged with mailing bombs that were defused at the Eleventh Circuit's headquarters in Atlanta and at the Jacksonville office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).