The Wilmington Star News publishes the editorial, "Thoughts on a week of legislative mayhem in Raleigh." One section, "Turning back the clock," deals with the Racial Justice Act.
Despite ample and convincing evidence that race often is a factor when juries hand down death sentences, the state Senate voted last week to repeal the Racial Justice Act. North Carolina was a leader when it passed; now it is swimming against a slow but growing tide of states that question how fairly and how accurately the death penalty is applied. Three North Carolina inmates were able to convince a judge under the Racial Justice Act that prosecutorial exclusion of qualified blacks and other race-based factors likely made the difference between life and death sentences. And the list of convicted inmates whose names have since been cleared is getting longer, suggesting that our system is more imperfect than we care to admit.
Yet senators, led by Wilmington's own Thom Goolsby, chose to reinstate the potential for bias.
"Senate Bill 306 Sponsor Says R.J.A. Is Wrongly Removing People From Death Row," is by Ran Northam at Chapelboro.
Capital punishment is on its way back to North Carolina and one proponent says it’s been avoided for years for the wrong reason.
“We do have the death penalty here in North Carolina,” says the Republican Senator from District 9, Thom Goolsby, the primary sponsor of Senate Bill 306, entitled Capital Punishment/Amendments. “We have 150-plus people on death row, and no one has been executed since 2006 due to a defacto moratorium for a number of reasons, primarily something called the Racial Justice Act, which is not about race and it’s not about justice. It’s an attempt to do an end-run around the death penalty and end it.”
The ACLU Blog of Rights posts, "Justice Under Attack: The North Carolina Legislature Takes Aim at the Racial Justice Act," by Cassandra Stubbs. There is video at the link.
In 2009, North Carolina made history by becoming the first state to pass a law that addressed the systemic problems of racial discrimination in jury selection in capital cases. In the three years since the Racial Justice Act (RJA) was enacted, this law has uncovered systemic discrimination. In four cases, North Carolina death row inmates presented sweeping evidence that racial discrimination in jury selection tainted their trials, and had their death sentences converted to life without parole under the law.
Earlier coverage from North Carolina begins at the link.
Comments