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North
Carolina’s Racial Justice Act is in trouble. The law has barely been on
the books for two years, but in that short amount of time it’s caused a
mountain of controversy.
The landmark piece of legislation, signed into law in 2009, allows death
row inmates to appeal their sentence on the basis that racial bias
played a role in their sentencing, and it allows inmates to bring
statistics before judges to help make their case. If they can prove that
it did, they win an opportunity to have their sentences commuted to
life in prison. All but three of the state’s death row inmates have appealed their sentences.
However, state lawmakers are nearing the end of a
three-day session that could result in the gutting of the law.
Opponents of the law have argued that it’s sloppily written and could
allow inmates to use statistics of racial injustice from other
jurisdictions in their appeals. Already, they’ve won revisions to the law over the summer. Limits were placed on the types of statistics inmates can use in their appeals and courts were required to find that prosecutors acted “with discriminatory
purpose” in seeking the death penalty. That change represented a meaningful undermining of the point: The law had moved courts to a focus on racially disparate outcomes, rather than a racist intent.
It’s an historic law
with far-reaching implications (Kentucky is the only other state in the
country that currently has a racial justice law). For a criminal
justice system that’s rife with well-documented racial disparities, in
some advocates’ eyes the law is an important legal step toward
acknowledging that society’s rules don’t apply equally to everyone.
And that’s particularly true when it comes to the death penalty.
Georgia’s controversial execution of Troy Davis in September shed light
on the disturbing reality that poor black men are more likely to be
killed by the state than any other racial group, particularly when the
crime victim is white. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977,
56 percent of inmates killed by the state have been black.
That’s just
the harshest measure of how race colors tough sentencing: Nationally, 48
percent– that’s nearly 70,000 people–of those who’ve been sentenced to life
in prison are black, despite the fact that the black inmates make up 38
percent of the total prison population.
North Carolina is one of 34 states in the U.S. that currently executes prisoners. The Death Penalty Information Center lists it as having
the country’s sixth largest death row. The majority of people on it–86 out of a total of 157 inmates–are African American.
Advocates for Justice, an association of North Carolina’s defense
attorneys, has joined the NAACP in publicly supporting the law during
this most recent legislative backlash. The two groups wrote a letter in support of
the Racial Justice Act earlier this month. The four-page letter cites a popular
Michigan State University study that found that a defendant in North
Carolina is 2.6 times more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim
is white.
“The courts of North Carolina have been doing an exemplary job of
managing litigation under RJA, both in terms of avoiding unnecessary
costs and in terms of expediting review of serious claims of racial
discrimination,” the letter reads. “Now is not the time for the General
Assembly to tinker with the statute and create potentially new avenues
of appeal.”
The joint letter submitted in support of the bill was filed one day after 43 of the state’s 44 district attorneys wrote a letter
to state senators asking them to pass a new bill, Senate Bill 9, that
would repeal the Racial Justice Act when the state’s General Assembly
reconvened on Nov. 27. The prosecutors have said that they see the
law as an attempt to end the death penalty in the state. “Do not allow
North Carolina to continue this charade on its citizens,
your constituents, with regards to the death penalty,” the letter said,
according to the Associated Press.
“It was, in reality, a permanent moratorium on the death penalty in
North Carolina,” Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby said about Racial Justice Act, according to the Sun News.
The
state House voted to nullify the Racial Justice Act in June. But the
effort to repeal it in both chambers has been a top legislative priority for Republicans
since they rose to power in 2010. Time and again, Republican lawmakers
have been cited as saying that the law is merely an effort to stop the
state’s executions altogether.
“They know historically if you are poor and African American, you are sentenced to death,” state Rep. Earline Parmon told local reporters about the fight to keep the law alive. “This is proven by many studies across the nation. So we know racially motivated convictions to death row are real.”