The Racial Justice Act, SB 461, received final passage in the North Carolina House yesterday. It returns to the Senate where a different version has already passed. Today's Winston-Salem Journal reports, "N.C. House approves Racial Justice Act."
The N.C. House gave its final approval yesterday to a bill known as the North Carolina Racial Justice Act, which would set up new ways for defendants and death-row inmates to argue that capital punishment is applied in a racially biased manner.
The House approved the bill on a vote of 61-53, with most Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed.
The N.C. Senate previously approved a different version of the bill. Before it can become law, the House and Senate must agree on a single version.
Today's Carrboro Citizen has the OpEd, "Overcoming the demagoguery about death and taking steps forward - barely," by Chris Fitzsimon. He's the director of NC Policy Watch.
The death penalty was front-and- center at the General Assembly Tuesday, as lawmakers debated proposals to prohibit the execution of people with a severe mental illness and to provide safeguards to make it less likely that race will play a role in capital cases.
After a heated and emotional debate, the House passed the Racial Justice Act that would allow a defendant to present evidence that race was a significant factor in the decision to seek the death penalty or impose it.
House Minority Leader Paul Stam made a series of absurd claims during the debate, most offensively that lawmakers who supported the bill would somehow be responsible for murders committed because, according to Stam, the death penalty is a deterrent.The debate also included exchanges on topics that had little to do with the proposal: the gruesome details of specific crimes, the exoneration of people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, even the Holocaust.
The bill simply gives a capital defendant a specific opportunity to make the case that race was playing an improper role in his or her case. That’s it. It is not an attempt to abolish the death penalty and it has nothing to do with past reforms of capital punishment or guilt or innocence.
People convicted of first-degree murder are either sentenced to death or life in prison without parole. Those are the only choices. You would think that adding a procedure to make sure that decision is made fairly wouldn’t inspire such vigorous opposition. Thank goodness a narrow majority of the House understands that.
Earlier coverage of the legislation begins with yesterday's post.
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