CDPL attorneys were part of a team that argued Racial Justice Act cases in the NC Supreme Court in 2019

CDPL is proud to announce that we have been awarded this year’s Equity Award from the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts. The award honors individuals and organizations that work to eliminate bias and promote equal access to the courts. It was awarded to CDPL in recognition of decades of work to expose and remedy racism in the North Carolina death penalty, as well as the court system as a whole.

CDPL has undertaken two major areas of litigation focused on rooting out racism. First, we worked alongside partners to pass the 2009 Racial Justice Act, which allowed people on death row to unearth sweeping evidence that Black citizens were systematically denied the right to serve on capital juries. It also brought to light evidence that Black defendants were more likely to face the death penalty when the victim was white. Four people have been resentenced under the law and litigation continues. Also, since 2015, CDPL has expanded its work on racism in jury selection to include non-capital cases. We worked with many partner organizations to expose the North Carolina courts’ abysmal record of enforcing Batson v. Kentucky, the law preventing jury strikes based on race. Those efforts culminated this year when, for the first time in its history, the N.C. Supreme Court overturned a case because of racism in jury selection.

All these efforts have been accompanied by a comprehensive public education campaign intended to educate the public about the insidious role in the capital punishment system. In 2020, we released Racist Roots, an ambitious project that traces the racist origins of capital punishment from the past to the present. We are now working on a soon-to-be released film version of the project:

We are grateful for this recognition of our work and vow to continue our work to end the racist death penalty.

Read Henderson Hill’s letter nominating CDPL for the award.

Gretchen Engel, right, with Asheville advocate Jean Parks

There are so many reasons to end the death penalty. We could talk about it for days and never come to the end of its injustices. But in this interview, CDPL’s Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel condenses it to thirty minutes.

In that short time, she explains how most of the people on North Carolina’s death row were sentenced under outdated laws, the “barbaric” lack of protections for people with mental illness, the ways that exonerations have woken people up to the injustice of the death penalty, the nonsensical way we decide who to try capitally in North Carolina, the scourge of prosecutorial misconduct, and Wake County’s strange insistence on frequent capital trials, despite the fact that juries keep saying no to the racist, unjust death penalty. And that’s not even a complete list!

After thirty years as a capital defense lawyer, Gretchen has seen North Carolina transform from a state where prosecutors almost always won and people were regularly executed, to one where death sentences are rare and executions haven’t been carried out in fifteen years. She’s never wavered in her conviction that she’s fighting for the right side, but it used to feel like the losing side. Now, she says prosecutors are most often the losers as they fight for death sentences in a state that has outgrown executions. “I’d much rather be in my lane than that one.”

Listen to the full interview here.

On January 21, one of North Carolina’s most dedicated advocates, Gerda Stein, will leave her long-time post as Director of Public Information at CDPL. Here, Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel pays tribute to a colleague and friend who has left an indelible mark on our movement — and whose kindness has touched many people who faced execution.

Gerda Stein with Henry McCollum, a longtime CDPL client who was exonerated in 2014 after 30 years on death row

By Gretchen M. Engel

This is not a eulogy.

That said, it is with deep sadness that I mourn, after 30 incredible years of service, Gerda Stein’s departure from CDPL later this month.

I met Gerda in the fall of 1991, when I was law student interning at Ferguson Stein.  Gerda had just been hired as a mitigation investigator at the NC Resource Center.  I had no idea then that Gerda would become one of my dearest friends and colleagues.

In the early 1990s, many men and women received the death penalty from juries who knew little about their lives.  Gerda changed that.  She worked with the UNC school for social work, organized trainings, consulted with capital defense teams and, through perseverance and patience, institutionalized the practice of mitigation investigation in capital cases in our state.  (Gerda would be the first to point out that she was not the only one involved in these efforts.  Of course she was integral to these efforts.  And, besides, this piece is about Gerda.)

Gerda was also a practicing model for new recruits.  She comforted Henry McCollum through years of depression before he was exonerated in 2014.  Her empathy for Norris Taylor, a desperately abused and mentally ill man, was legendary.  When he died of natural causes in 2006, the prison didn’t know any family members to call.  So they called Gerda.  Gerda was the mitigation investigator and later a member of the successful clemency delegation for Robert Bacon and, when Robert was dying, his sister likewise contacted Gerda.

The work was demanding and emotionally exhausting.  Our clients’ childhoods are so often horrifying and the daily exposure to stories of degradation and violence is corrosive.  Eliciting those stories and then helping to present them to jurors is hard even when you win.  And in the 1990s, we often lost.

Gretchen and Gerda in the old days

Gerda took a brief hiatus from CDPL sometime in the late 1990s.  It’s hard to remember now, because it feels to me like she was always there: She was there the nights my clients Harvey Green and Quentin Jones were executed.  Along with his attorneys and daughter, Gerda was with Dawud Abdullah Muhammad the night he was executed.  Between 1992 and 2006, nearly 40 times, at two o’clock in the morning, Gerda was there.

In 2000, Gerda came back to CDPL to take on a new challenge, telling the stories she knew so well to the public at large.  This was shortly after the national backlash to Benetton’s “We, on Death Row” ad campaign, and becoming CDPL’s public education director was no small challenge.  Back then, lawyers for people facing the death penalty were loath to speak to the press because their stories invariably and exclusively focused on the gory crime facts and suffering of people who’d lost a loved one to murder.  And the execution machine was burning at full throttle: in just over four months in the fall of 2003, North Carolina executed seven men.

Gerda brought her compassion, work ethic, fearlessness, and vision to the task and, over the years, media coverage of capital cases has dramatically changed.  First there was the series in the Charlotte Observer exposing the under-resourced state of capital defense and the endemic racism in our cases.  Later the News & Observer ran a series on prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions in death penalty cases.

In clemency campaign after clemency campaign, Gerda worked with defense teams to expose injustices in individual cases.  Among many hard losses, Gerda was there to see the Colosseum in Rome lit up after Governor Hunt granted clemency to Wendell Flowers, to see Tim Allen and Pat Jennings sentenced to life after they’d each spent two decades on death row, and she was there to see Alan Gell and Henry McCollum walk free after years of wrongful incarceration.  And she’s been here to see 15 years with no executions, 15 more years of life for Blanche and Dan and Phil and Priscilla, and so many others.

Because our names both start with a hard “G,” I’ve often been called Gerda over the years – although never “Girla,” Norris Taylor’s pet name for Ms. Stein.  For years after we made a trip to Washington D.C. to investigate Tim Allen’s case, I would explain on the phone to Tim’s family members, “I’m Gretchen.  No, the pregnant woman was Gerda.  I’m the other one.”  How flattering it’s been to be confused with the most dedicated and powerful advocate and kindest human being I know.