North Carolina’s death-row racial bias law may be dropped
RALEIGH, N.C. — All but three of North Carolina’s 157 death row inmates are waiting for their day in court to argue that racial bias played a role in their case. But the law that gives them hope is on shaky ground.
State lawmakers are scheduled to congregate in Raleigh Sunday night for the start of a three-day session that could result in the gutting of the historic Racial Justice Act.
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The death row inmates have included findings in their complaints from Michigan State University law school researchers that show that defendants who killed a white person in North Carolina were two-and-a-half times more likely to be sentenced to death than those whose victims were black. The findings also show that juries were disproportionately white.
Prosecutors complain that using statistics without the facts of each case can skew the picture.
But defense attorneys who fought for the law say the statistics tell an alarming story: In North Carolina, African-American jury pool members who were not rejected for cause – such as opposition to the death penalty – were rejected by prosecutors at about two times the rate as similarly situated whites.
The disparity was even greater in Cumberland and Wake counties. In Wake County, qualified potential African-American jurors were rejected at 2.5 times the rate of all other jurors; their Cumberland County counterparts were rejected at 2.6 times the rate, according to the Michigan research.
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Critics of the law argue it is a thinly veiled attempt to do away with the death penalty in North Carolina. Though people are still being sentenced to death in this state, no execution has been carried out since 2007, when a series of lawsuits sparked a de facto moratorium.
We’ve been through this before. Defendants who kill a white person probably killed the white person under more heinous circumstances than the defendant who killed the black person. Almost all the defendants in the killing of black people are themselves black (and maybe increasingly Hispanic, in North Carolina, Mexico’s newest colony), and it’s harder for any jury to pass out the death sentence against a black defendant. Don’t forget, not every homicide is a first degree murder, often times they are charged as, or pled down to, Murder Two. The defendants who kill white people are partly white and partly black, and white juries with white defendants and white victims are more likely than in any other circumstance to hand down the death penalty.
As for the juror rejection, that line they’re feeding you in this story is bullshit, because Federal civil rights laws disallow prosecutors from using preemptory challenges against prospective minority jurors when the minority is of the same race as the defendant. If these black jurors were rejected without cause, i.e. preemptorily, it is the defense lawyers that did it.
