That's the title of an editorial in the Sunday edition of North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal. LINK Here's an extended excerpt:
The problems with the death penalty in this state have been underscored time and time again, including through three high-profile cases from other parts of North Carolina in which inmates who had been on death row were freed from prison. The penalty has been on an unofficial moratorium since 2006 as officials try to resolve questions regarding whether doctors should participate in executions. But with problems from past cases continuing to mount, a bill that addresses racial bias in death-penalty cases is timely.
The bill filed by Reps. Larry Womble and Earline Parmon of Forsyth County would allow judges to throw out the death penalty in a specific case if they found a trend indicating racial bias in other cases. Forsyth County District Attorney Tom Keith and other prosecutors have many objections to the bill, including that it amounts to a legislative end-run to abolish the death penalty, paints them as racist and is based on questionable statistics.
Every black person on death row convicted of killing a white person didn't land there because of racial bias. Even if this bill, the Racial Justice Act, were to pass, there's no guarantee defense attorneys would have much success with it. The argument behind the bill was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1987, as the Journal's James Romoser noted in a recent story. Only one other state, Kentucky, has a version of the Racial Justice Act.
But racial bias, just as misconduct by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys, should be explored more thoroughly. Every effort should be made to identify and eliminate every flaw in the system. Attorney General Roy Cooper, who hasn't had much to say about this bill, should be leading the charge to reform the death penalty in this state.
Defense attorneys nationwide have long raised issues of racial bias in death-penalty cases, especially in regard to jury selection. But this bill would ease the process in North Carolina cases, despite the contentions of Keith and other prosecutors that each case should be decided on its own facts.
"You can't just look at an individual case, because each capital case is a microcosm of the entire criminal justice system," said Mark Rabil, a Winston-Salem lawyer whose efforts finally won exoneration in 2004 for Darryl Hunt, a black man who spent more than 18 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of the murder of Deborah Sykes, who was white.
Proving racial bias, like any endeavor involving human motivations and feelings, is extremely difficult. Socioeconomics often enters the picture as well.
And:
The Racial Justice Act won't fix the myriad problems with the administration of capital punishment in North Carolina. But it would encourage the court system to tackle questions of bias in these cases and attempt to resolve, once and for all, whether there is a widespread pattern of bias. Before this state returns to executions, it should do whatever it can to answer all the questions tied to them.
Earlier coverage of the legislation begins here.
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