North Carolina's death row could be much smaller if all the inmates claiming that racial bias played a part in their trials and death sentences are successful in challenges filed over the past week.
Tuesday was the deadline for death row inmates to seek to have their death sentences converted to life without parole under the fledgling Racial Justice Act, and by late afternoon, the state Attorney General's Office had received notice that 119 of the 159 death row inmates were seeking such relief.
That might not be the final tally. Some motions could have been filed late in the day in courts across the state and not yet forwarded to the state attorney general. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of requests has caused concerns in courthouses throughout North Carolina about the process for handling the cases.
Lawyers at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham said they expected most, but not all of the people sentenced to death in North Carolina to seek relief under the historic Racial Justice Act, signed into law Aug. 11, 2009.
The law, one of only two in the country, was adopted last year after months of contention along party lines and much opposition from prosecutors, law enforcement organizations and victims rights advocates. It is designed to combat racial disparities in death sentences and has prompted claims from white and black inmates.
The law allows death row inmates and defendants in death penalty cases to challenge prosecutions on grounds of bias. It also allows judges to consider statistics and anecdotal trends of racial disparities in death sentences, as well as testimony, to change a death sentence to life in prison without parole. A judge could also consider the same kind of information to keep prosecutors from seeking capital punishment at the outset of a case.
In the cases of the death row inmates, defense attorneys s are pushing for a streamlined process, by which some of the weightier issues of the new law can be decided early on by the state Supreme Court and applied en masse.
Case by case, please
Prosecutors, who before the law was adopted complained that challenges by most death row inmates would bog down the courts, are now pushing for cases to be heard on an individual basis.
"Each one of these cases has unique facts and circumstances, and each one involves the most serious crime and the most severe punishment," said Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby. "To lump a bunch of them together would be like doing a Rev. [Sun Myung] Moon wedding, and it shouldn't be." (Moon, a Korean billionaire, is known for conducting mass nuptials involving thousands.)
Last week, after five death row inmates filed the first challenges under the year-old Racial Justice Act, attorneys on three of the cases asked the state Supreme Court to consolidate all the cases to save money and court time.
The attorneys asked that the cases be declared "exceptional and assigned to one Superior Court judge who would rule on issues common to each."
Though discussions among defense lawyers and prosecutors have been under way for months, Noelle Talley, a spokeswoman for state Attorney General Roy Cooper, said no decisions had been made. Justice Department lawyers were continuing to consult with North Carolina district attorneys on the most appropriate way to handle the cases. Talley said.
James Coleman, a Duke University law professor, said there could be benefits to the inmates if the cases are reviewed in a consolidated manner.
In their filings, many of the inmates tried to bolster their bias claims with findings from a study done by Catherine Grosso and Barbara O'Brien, professors at the Michigan State University College of Law.
Mostly white jurors
The law professors' study of 5,800 cases eligible for the death penalty from 1990 through 2009 shows that more than 40 percent of the defendants on North Carolina's death row were sentenced to death by a jury that was either all-white or included only one person of color. The researchers also found that in selection of juries, prosecutors statewide struck qualified blacks from the potential jury pool at more than twice the rate at which they struck whites.
"What the Supreme Court ought to do is consolidate these cases," Coleman said. "If you put them togetherthere're some common issues."
Though this country's justice system was designed on the premise of being blind to such demographic issues as race, sex and social standing, several recent studies show that juries, particularly in the South, continued to be haunted by a pervasive race-based exclusion.
A persistent issue
In the 135 years that have passed since the 1875 Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in jury selection, the courts have repeatedly been called on to address the issue.
In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision forbidding prosecutors from excluding blacks from juries without a good explanation, but it is up to a judge to decide whether there was deliberate discrimination, setting the bar very high for defense lawyers mounting challenges.
The Racial Justice Act allows judges to consider statistical evidence. But prosecutors say statistics cannot be considered in a vacuum,
"The accusations are that somehow because a jury was all white, it was racist, and I don't know how you get to that conclusion," Willoughby said.
