"Justice act is law; prosecutors must live with it," is the editorial in today's Fayetteville Observer.
You could pretty much see this coming. Two Cumberland County assistant district attorneys who asked to have Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks removed from a case, based on conjecture, were rebuffed.
Their petition made no mention of Weeks' race - he's African American - but, because the case he was to hear was a sentence review under North Carolina's new Racial Justice Act, it was almost as predictable that some would perceive a hidden motive: a fear of what a black judge might say about the fairness of capital cases in Cumberland County.
That, too, was conjecture.
And:
Two things prevent this episode from going into the books as an arcane legal tiff.
First, it's hard to see what, if the gambit had succeeded, would have kept any lawyer on any side of a case from blocking a hearing by seeking a vague subpoena for a judge's testimony.
Second, the prosecutors' challenge to Weeks probably reinforced the suspicion that both offends them and underpins the Racial Justice Act.
The AP reports, "Hearing for death row inmate under NC Racial Justice Act delayed until January." It's via the Republic.
A hearing for a Fayetteville man trying to get off death row on the grounds of racial bias has been postponed until January.
The hearing for Marcus Robinson had been scheduled to begin Tuesday. At a hearing Thursday in Nashville, Nash County Superior Court Judge Quentin Sumner granted prosecutors' request to delay the next evidentiary hearing to Jan. 30.
Robinson is trying to use the North Carolina Racial Justice Act to prove that racism led to his death sentence in 1994. If he wins his claim, his sentence will be converted to life in prison. Robinson's attorneys say prosecutors discriminated against qualified black jurors at his 1994 trial for killing a white teenager.
Earlier coverage of the North Carolina RJA begins at the link.
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