Roy Cooper’s commutations should signal the death penalty’s end in North Carolina | Opinion

Across the country, death sentences began a steep and steady decline twenty-five years ago. Today, just a relic of the prior practice remains in a handful of scattered counties, which maintain the practice at great public expense. North Carolina is no exception to this national trend. The death penalty is at the end of its rope. There are good reasons why.

As a law professor who works to promote effective policy, it is clear to me that many of our responses to crime are based on inertia and emotion rather than solid evidence. That is especially true for the death penalty, which has no deterrent effect, costs taxpayers dearly and is riddled with errors and biases.

That is why Gov. Roy Cooper’s commutation of 15 death sentences to life without parole sentences bears great significance. Cooper is the first governor in the history of North Carolina’s modern death penalty to grant more than two such commutations. With his action, Cooper acknowledged, in detailing a series of factors these cases implicated, the death penalty’s flaws and the responsibility of elected leaders to move away from this failed policy. His death row commutations, alongside other commutations and pardons, are part of a larger effort to move toward smarter approaches to public safety.

In 2020, Cooper created the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, a huge step towards addressing racial inequities embedded in our criminal system. In 2021, he created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board to begin to ameliorate excessive sentences imposed on children. In 2023, he formed the Office of Violence Prevention, which takes a public health approach to preventing violence by strengthening communities. Research shows these types of tactics do far more to prevent future violence than excessive prison sentences or executions.

Now, Cooper is leading the way on addressing North Carolina’s oversized death row. Before these 15 commutations, it housed 136 people, nearly all of whom were sentenced more than 20 years ago. Today, capital trials are rare and juries almost never choose death sentences. In 2024, just three death penalty trials occurred with no new death sentences. A new Gallup poll found death penalty support continuing to erode among all groups, but especially among young people.

Most on death row were tried in a different era, when North Carolina had some of the highest death sentencing rates in the country and an unreasonable, and later repealed, law forcing prosecutors to pursue death in every aggravated first-degree murder. This law, unique in the nation, resulted in dozens of death sentences a year, mostly handled by overburdened and underpaid defense attorneys because North Carolina did not create a statewide public defense service until 2001.

The creation of Indigent Defense Services was one of many reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s that transformed death penalty trials. In my research, I have found that adequate resources for defense offices can play a huge role in death sentencing. Yet, most of those now awaiting execution predated those reforms. In more recent years, litigation under the Racial Justice Act has also raised serious questions about the role of race in North Carolina’s death sentences.

It will take visionary actions like Cooper’s to ensure that executions based on unfair and racially biased trials are never carried out. Several years ago, Virginia ceased its use of the death penalty because the costly practice had effectively ended on the ground.

Many more cases raise the same factors as the 15 that the Governor addressed. I hope that the Governor’s action will only be the start of a concerted effort to take legal action to move North Carolina away from the death penalty. On the ground, our communities have already largely severed our ties to this ineffective policy. We should instead focus our resources and energy on finding solutions to violence that hold offenders accountable while actually making our communities safer. Other leaders should take a cue from Cooper, who has shown a willingness to enact smart public safety policy with justice as a guiding principle.

Brandon Garrett is the L. Neil Williams Professor of Law, at Duke University School of Law and the director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice.