[5] Henry Alford was a black man in the South, at the height of the civil rights movement, who had previously been convicted of murder and armed robbery.

On November 22, 1963, Alford and a white woman companion rented a room at a “party house” in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and allegedly got into a fight with its proprietor, Nathaniel Young, who was also black.

[2] Justice Byron White wrote that the Court had accepted the case for review, because some states authorized conviction only for a crime “where guilt is shown,” including by means of a guilty plea that included an actual admission of guilt, but “others have concluded that they should not ‘force any defense on a defendant in a criminal case,’ particularly when advancement of the defense might ‘end in disaster,” and therefore would accept a guilty plea in Alford's circumstances.

[3] He concluded the plea should have been vacated and Alford should have been retried, writing: "the facts set out in the majority opinion demonstrate that Alford was 'so gripped by fear of the death penalty' that his decision to plead guilty was not voluntary but was "the product of duress as much so as choice reflecting physical constraint.

"[3] Stephanos Bibas (who would be appointed as a federal judge by President Donald Trump in 2017) has spoken out against the Alford plea on the moral ground that it undermines public confidence in the accuracy and fairness of the criminal justice system, sending some people to jail who profess innocence; and that it dodges the "morality play" aspect of a criminal trial, in which the community sees that the guilty are punished.