RALEIGH -- Death penalty opponents gathered in front of the Capitol on Monday to push for further investigation of the State Bureau of Investigation crime lab.
The morning event brought together representatives from the NAACP, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, the N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium, the ACLU of North Carolina, the Carolina Justice Policy Center, and Murder Victims Family Members for Reconciliation of North Carolina with Darryl Hunt, who spent 18 years in prison, wrongfully convicted of murder and rape, before being exonerated.
The organizations came together after the release last week of a scathing audit of the State Bureau of Investigation crime lab, a review that found flawed laboratory work in the cases of death row inmates, three that had been executed before the revelation.
In addition to their pleas for a more sweeping examination of the SBI crime lab, the speakers called for an investigation into the cases of each of the 159 inmates on North Carolina's death row, further study of all evidence in pending capital cases and for a vetting of the cases of all inmates executed since the crime lab's beginning.
They asked for a moratorium on executions until such investigations could be carried out, and they called on the governor to commute all death sentences to life in prison without possibility of parole.
"The pursuit of justice is, and should be, our common thread," said Jeremy Collins, director of the N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium, a nonprofit, nonpartisan partnership of organizations and people in support of reforms to the state's capital punishment system and a moratorium on executions. "It is our hope that justice, not tainted and manipulated science, will be the guiding light of our criminal justice system."
The calls for a moratorium and repeal of the death penalty come the same month that all but a dozen death row inmates have asked, under the year-old Racial Justice Act, to have their sentences converted to life in prison without possibility of parole.
The new law gave all current death row inmates until Aug. 10 to use statistical evidence, which can reveal patterns of discrimination, whether intentional or not, to challenge their trials and sentences. New studies have found qualified blacks in potential jury pools have been excluded from capital trials at disproportionate rates, and that more than 40 percent of North Carolina's 159 death row inmates have been tried by juries that were all-white or had only one black member.
All but a dozen of the current death row inmates are seeking relief under the new law.
