justice_photo.jpgStaff Reports

In 2009 North Carolina made history by passing the Racial Justice Act, which allowed prisoners who had been given the death penalty to challenge their sentences by showing racial bias on the part of the prosecutor, judge, or jury. The law allowed inmates to use statistics to bolster their cases.

Several months ago the need for the Act was validated when a North Carolina Superior Court judge determined—in a ruling on facts—that racial discrimination occurred in death penalty trials across the state over a multi-year period.

One of the most common forms of bias used by prosecutors is through peremptory challenges in jury selection, in which black and Hispanic potential jurors are routinely kept off juries in death-penalty cases; another tactic is to empanel juries of 11 or even 12 whites in cases with a white murder victim, while juries on cases with minority victims are rarely so heavily segregated.

The judge’s findings should trouble everyone who is committed to a justice system based on fairness, integrity, and equal protection under the law. But the Republican majority in the General Assembly chose not to fix the systemic flaws but, instead, to eviscerate the Racial Justice Act.

In 2011 the Republican-led legislature tried unsuccessfully to repeal the act; while that attempt failed, they returned in 2012 with a “compromise” bill, Senate Bill 416, which disallows the use of statistics showing a pattern of bias across the state and narrows the grounds on which claims of bias can be made.

The new bill, called “An Act To Amend Death Penalty Procedures,” was developed at the behest of prosecutors, many of whom have records of racially biased jury selection and other suspect behaviors that brought about the Racial Justice Act in the first place and that had begun to be exposed by its application.

S.416 passed the legislature and was vetoed by Governor Bev Perdue, but at the end of the 2012 “short session” the legislature successfully overrode her veto.