North Carolina's Racial Justice Act helps defendants highlight bias that they believe taints a death-penalty prosecution. For instance, it lets them challenge a death sentence with statistics suggesting that racial discrimination has tilted the judicial scales.
The law grew out of long-standing concerns that there was a double standard when it came to imposing the ultimate punishment, with someone who murdered a white person more likely to face execution than someone who murdered an African-American.
If such a disparity exists, it has curious policy implications: Should more black defendants be sentenced to death to even things out? Given the kinds of flaws in the system that have led to some notable miscarriages of justice in capital cases, as well as other reasons why the death penalty is problematic, executing more people would not be the solution to anything.
That said, if the law now gives a person a better chance to show that race was one of the reasons he ended up on death row, then this is a picture that North Carolina must be prepared to confront.
Death-row inmates were given a year from the date the law took effect to initiate their challenges, making Tuesday the cutoff. And the first group of five challenges reflect some disturbing patterns.
Juries in monochrome
What stood out in a report last week by The N&O's Ann Blythe was evidence that the five defendants' fates had been decided by juries on which black membership was notably sparse.
The defendants point to a study by researchers from Michigan State University, who examined jury selection in 5,800 North Carolina cases from 1990 through 2009 that could have led to the death penalty.
According to Blythe's article, the study determined that more than 40 percent of the state's condemned inmates were sentenced by juries that either were all-white in makeup or had only one person of color. The state lists the racial composition of its death row, as of June 21, as 87 blacks, 60 whites, eight Indians and four other.
Qualification for jury service is not a given. Any number of factors can lead to a potential juror being properly dismissed for cause, and in some cases those factors may weigh against African-Americans.
Strike-out kings
But in a state where about 21 percent of the population is black, it's hard to explain in rational terms why so many juries ended up with so few black participants. The pattern suggests an excessive use of so-called peremptory strikes by prosecutors, systematically weeding out jurors who they believed might be overly sympathetic to a black defendant.
Notions of racial solidarity of course should not influence a juror's decisions. But a defendant is entitled under the Constitution to be tried by a jury of his or her peers. That means a jury whose makeup reasonably reflects the community. A policy of racial exclusion defies that principle and is manifestly unfair.
One of the inmates seeking to have his death sentence converted under the Racial Justice Act to life without parole is Guy LeGrande, convicted in a 1993 Stanly County murder-for-hire scheme. The husband who supposedly hired LeGrande to kill his wife was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder. LeGrande, who suffers from mental illness and was permitted to represent himself at trial, was convicted by an all-white jury. All the qualified black jurors were struck by prosecutors, compared with 26 percent of the whites.
Racial bias could influence decisions to charge someone with murder rather than a lesser form of homicide, to try them with their life at stake rather than not, to convict rather than acquit, to sentence to death rather than life in prison. The Racial Justice Act will serve a purpose if it exposes instances where such influence has indeed come to bear. At this point, sad to say, there's little reason to think that it won't.
