Death penalty racial bias cases go to N.C. high court

RALEIGH, N.C. — Four death row prisoners will argue to North Carolina’s highest court that racial bias so infected their trials that they should be resentenced to life in prison as attorneys revive arguments about a repealed law on race and capital punishment.

The state Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday and Tuesday in the cases of four death row inmates who briefly were resentenced to life without parole when legislators approved the Racial Justice Act in 2009. The law was repealed four years later.

Justices also will hear from attorneys for two other death row prisoners whose RJA claims weren’t decided before the law was repealed.

“We found the evidence (of racial bias), then the legislature repealed the law,” said David Weiss, staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “The question is: Can we act as if that evidence was never uncovered?”

The center describes differing types of racial bias in all the cases, including prosecutors who described a black juror with a criminal history as a “thug” while using “a fine guy” to describe a white juror who had trafficked in drugs. It said that a statistical study showed in all the cases that prosecutors struck qualified black jurors at far higher rates than white jurors. In some cases, an all-white jury decided the fate of the defendants sentenced to death row.

Under the RJA, condemned men and women could challenge their death sentences by using statistics to show that race tainted their trials. When Republicans took control of the legislature and amended the law in 2012, they set a new limit on what statistics can be used and said those numbers alone couldn’t be used to show race was a significant factor in a death row prisoner’s conviction or sentence.

Legislators repealed the law in

2013, and the four who had been resentenced to life behind bars were returned to death row.

North Carolina has 142 people on death row. Fifty-two, or about 36 percent, are white. The other 90 prisoners, or about 63 percent, are black, Native American or other. The overall state population is almost 71 percent white.

“One of the big takeaways from the Racial Justice Act is that when we look behind the curtain” there’s evidence of racial bias, Weiss said.