The Center for Death Penalty Litigation

Watch CDPL’s 2020 Osborn Award Celebration

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Congratulations again to Tye Hunter, the 2020 winner of CDPL’s Osborn Award for outstanding leadership in capital defense. If you missed our virtual event on October 15, you can watch it here. Even though we couldn’t be together in person, we had a lovely time together. We know that Tye felt loved and appreciated, and all of us felt buoyed in our work to end the unjust death penalty.

Here are just a few of the comments from the chat that evening. It was amazing how we felt our community’s presence, even though we were all in our separate homes.

Thank you to CDPL’s 2020 Osborn Award Sponsors

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Our Virtual Osborn Award celebration for Tye Hunter is October 15 at 7 p.m. GO HERE to watch. Though we cannot gather in person this year, we still want to celebrate Tye’s career and our movement’s many victories this year. And we still need your support to keep up the fight for a more humane world without the death penalty.

Below are the generous people who are sponsoring this year’s event. It’s not too late to add your name to this list. Go here to donate and include Osborn Award in the notes.

 

CHAMPIONS ($1000)

Donald Beskind & Wendy Robineau

Burton Craige

Jay & Kay Ferguson

Jon & Becky Megerian

Ken Rose & Beth Silberman

Beth & Tom Sallenger

Faith Spencer & Mark Parts

Adam & Jane Stein

Mary Ann Tally

Buddy & Lisa Conner

Anonymous

 

DEFENDERS ($500)

James Exum

Glenn, Mills, Fisher & Mahoney, PA

Wanda Hunter

Law Office of Kathleen M. Joyce

Robert Mahler

Marcia H. Morey

Christine Mumma

Racial Equity Institute

Susan and David Shipman

Andrew Short & Andrea Vizoso

Jacob Sussman

Amos Tyndall

Gay Wells & Family in memory of Frank Wells

 

ADVOCATES ($250)

Cindy Adcock & Pat McCoy

Akin Adepoju

David Botchin

Ken & Margie Broun

Buzzard Law Firm

Judy & Winston Charles

Andrew DeSimone

Cait Fenhagen & John Carlson

Karen Demby

Fred & Alana Friedman

Terrica Redfield Ganzy

Shirley Geissinger

Dionne Gonder-Stanley

Elaine M. Gordon & Robert M. Hurley

Sandra Hagood

Pricey Harrison

Henderson & Renee Hill

Linda Hudgins

Staples & Tamsie Hughes

Mark Kleinschmidt

Hunter Labovitz

Douglas Legg & Nina Goldman

Pascale & Nathaniel Mackey

David Mills

Janet Moore & Neil Tollas

Pat & Polly Morgan

Robert Mosteller & Elizabeth Gibson

North Carolina Justice Center

Kristin Parks

W. James Payne Law Firm

Rich Rosen & Becky Slifken

Steve Schewel & Lao Rubert

Helen & Fred Spielman

Mark Towler

Jenny Warburg

Gregory Weeks

James E. Williams Jr.

Gordon Worley

Julian Wright

 

SUPPORTERS & FRIENDS

Catherine Grosso & Stephen Gasteyer

Gaylen Brubaker

Jack & Jennifer Boger

Eugene & Signe Brown

Danielle Carman & Jeff Conners

Linda DeJongh

Hon. Patricia Devine

Richard Dieter

Mark Edwards

Betsy Fenhagen

Janet Flowers

Glenn Gerding

Alyson Grine & Karen Stegman

Meg & Allen Hart

Henry Lister

Ann Mack

Noel Nickle

Marilyn Ozer

Mark Rabil

Kara Richards

Cas Shearin & DeVon Tolson

Susan J. Weigand

Humza Hussain

Deborah & Steve MacDonald

Deborah Miller

Marshall Dayan

Susan E. Brooks

John Forbush

Jean Parks

Vincent Rabil

Rachel Ruderman

Ben Serrurier

Robert E. Seymour, Jr.

Robert & Jessica Singagliese

Nelson & Libby Smith

Eugenia Upchurch

Kimberly Stevens

Jenny & Terry Alford

Etta Blankenship

Emily Baxter

Jonathan & Joal Broun

Kelley Hunter & Joe Hunt

Susannah Hunter

Johanna Jennings

Mollie Lee

Anna Richards & LeRoi Brashears

Cassandra Stubbs

Brian Stull & Sejal Zota

Kimberly Talikoff

Robert Trenkle

Beth Winston

Jan Dodds

Bob and Kim Fuller

Marian Jensen

Sara Switek

Linda Weisel and Daniel Pollitt

Marilyn Worth

Penelope Maunsell Nye

Racist Roots finds a modern death penalty deeply entangled with North Carolina’s history of racism

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Racist Roots

In October 2020, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, in collaboration with scholars, advocates, artists, historians, poets, and people directly affected by the death penalty, launched Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty.

The project includes essays, poetry, artwork, commentary, and historical documents that place the state’s death penalty in the context of 400 years of history and expose its deep entanglement with slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and modern systemic racism. The death penalty, the project contends, is another Confederate monument that North Carolina must tear down. [Read the essay that sums up this project.]

“The death penalty began as a way to enforce a racist social order, and as it evolved through the generations, our state never addressed the original sin that lay at its root,” CDPL Executive Director Gretchen Engel said. “Today, the death penalty is the apex of a racist criminal punishment system that cages hundreds of thousands of people and declares human lives, particularly those of Black people, expendable. The clear message of this project is: Any meaningful conversation about race and criminal justice in North Carolina must include the death penalty.”

Racist Roots shows that in every incarnation, from slavery to post-Civil War Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, and to the modern criminal punishment system, those wielding the death penalty have imposed it disproportionately on Black people; valued the lives of white victims above all others; and excluded citizens of color from power by systematically excluding them from capital juries. So, while the precise influence of racism in the death penalty has changed from era to era, its essential nature has not.

Today, people of color make up less than 30 percent of North Carolina’s population but 60 percent of its death row. Black defendants are far more likely to be wrongly convicted; eight out of ten of North Carolina’s death row exonerees are Black and a ninth is Latino. Nearly half of the people on death row had an all-white jury or a jury with only a single person of color. Qualified Black jurors are two and a half times more likely than whites to be struck from capital juries. Defendants are twice as likely to be sentenced to death if they’re accused of killing a white person, rather than a person of color.

The project details the cases of some of North Carolina’s nearly 140 current death row prisoners to expose racism’s continuing influence. For example, Andrew Ramseur was sentenced to death in 2010 amid a racist public outcry comparing him to a “monkey” and demanding he be hung “from the nearest traffic light as a warning to the rest.” Rather than condemning bigotry, the district attorney promised — and successfully sought — a quick death sentence.

For essays, photography, video and more, go to RACISTROOTS.ORG

Four Racial Justice Act defendants are finally freed from racist death sentences

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The mother of Tilmon Golphin outside the N.C. Supreme Court in 2019.

Four clients represented by a team of litigators, including several CDPL attorneys, have now been resentenced to life without parole after the N.C. Supreme Court ruled that they were unconstitutionally returned to death row despite proving that racism polluted their trials and people of color were systematically excluded from the juries that sentenced them to death.

Christina Walters, Quintel Augustine, Marcus Robinson, and Tilmon Golphin were removed from death row thanks to successful claims filed under the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that allowed people on death row to bring forward evidence that race played a role in their trials in sentences.

The Racial Justice Act led to a statewide study showing that, in capital trials, prosecutors dismissed Black citizens at 2.5 times the rate they excluded whites. This disparity was driven entirely by race and could not be attributed to any other factor, such as death penalty views. It also found that crimes with white victims were twice as likely to be punished with death.

Walters, Augustine, Robinson, and Golphin were the only four death row prisoners to have Racial Justice Act hearings before the law was repealed in 2013. All four won their cases, using the study to show a pattern of race discrimination in North Carolina capital cases. They also unearthed prosecutors’ notes referring to jurors with denigrating terms like “blk wino,” and training materials showing that their prosecutors had been instructed on how to invent “race-neutral” reasons to justify their strikes of Black jurors.

In 2012, Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks resentenced all four to life without parole after finding a “wealth of evidence” that systemic exclusion of Black jurors had tainted their death sentences. However, after the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, the N.C. Supreme Court overturned Weeks’ ruling on procedural grounds, saying the hearings should have been held separately rather than jointly and that prosecutors should have had more time to prepare their case, even though the trial court had already given the state two continuances. The court ordered new RJA hearings for the four defendants, and in a legally questionable move, the N.C. Department of Public Safety quickly returned them to death row.

Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that the reinstatement of their death sentences was unconstitutional and has restored life sentences for all four. The decision was based on the state constitution and cannot be appealed.

In a separate ruling, the court also said that all North Carolina death row prisoners who filed RJA claims before the law’s 2013 repeal are entitled to hearings where they can present evidence that prosecutors purposefully excluded African American citizens from their juries and that racism tainted their trials. CDPL continues to litigate those cases.

The mothers of Marcus Robinson and Quintel Augustine in the courtroom during their 2019 Racial Justice Act hearings.

Tye Hunter wins CDPL’s 2020 J. Kirk Osborn Award

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WATCH THE AWARD PRESENTATION ON YOUTUBE (Thursday, October 15 at 7 p.m.)

SEE OUR SPONSORS

CDPL is proud to announce that Malcolm “Tye” Hunter is the winner of this year’s J. Kirk Osborn Award for outstanding leadership in capital defense. This year’s ceremony honoring Tye will be at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 15. The event is online. Simply go to cdpl.org and follow the link on our homepage to join us in celebrating Tye’s good work.

Though we can’t be together in person, we’ve done our best to make this an engaging event that reminds our community of the power and importance of capital defense work. There will be an appearance by a nationally known capital defense leader, as well as a moving musical performance. You don’t have to register, but we hope you will donate to CDPL’s work.

Suggested donation levels are:

Champion: $1,000
Defender: $500
Advocate: $250
Supporter: $75

We welcome donations of any amount, either in advance or during the event.

DONATE NOW

Tye Hunter: A career fighting the death penalty

Tye and his co-counsel outside the U.S. Supreme Court after arguing McKoy v. North Carolina.

Tye has devoted four decades to advancing indigent defense and fighting the death penalty. Tye worked as an assistant public defender in Fayetteville and then came to the Appellate Defender’s Office. He was the second director of OAD and while serving in that leadership role, he represented dozens of capital cases, winning new trials and new sentencing hearings for many. Tye appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in McKoy v. North Carolina. Tye’s victory in this single case resulted in relief for nearly 50 men and women who had received unconstitutional death sentences.

Tye was the first director of the N.C. Office of Indigent Defense Services and created the infrastructure that ensured qualified counsel, supported capital defense teams, and, not surprisingly, saw a dramatic drop in the number of death sentences returned in our state.

Tye next served as CDPL’s executive director from 2009 to 2013. He shepherded the office during the early years of the Racial Justice Act litigation. Tye was personally part of the RJA team that won relief for Marcus Robinson and three other Cumberland County capital defendants following two evidentiary hearings under the RJA. During those hearings, Tye’s fierce advocacy and famous wit were on full display and contributed greatly to these enormous victories.

Tye continued to represent death-sentenced clients after leaving CDPL, including Rayford Burke, another RJA client. Tye’s oral argument in the N.C. Supreme Court was a model of appellate advocacy and this past June, the court granted relief to Mr. Burke.

Tye being arrested at the N.C. legislature during Moral Monday protests.

The J. Kirk Osborn Award

J. Kirk Osborn

J. Kirk Osborn was one of the giants of the capital defense community. Kirk defended more than a dozen capital cases and never had a client sentenced to death. His advocacy and deep compassion for his clients saved many lives, and inspired other attorneys to follow in his footsteps. Each year, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation honors Kirk’s legacy by presenting the J. Kirk Osborn Award for lifelong zealous advocacy, compassion for indigent men and women facing the death penalty, and leadership among capital defense attorneys.

As we grieve the victims of racist violence, we want you to know where we stand

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A message from CDPL Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel:

When I came to North Carolina in 1992 to work against the death penalty, my first client was an African American man who’d been convicted of killing a white state trooper. My next client was an African American man whose white girlfriend persuaded him to kill her estranged white husband. An all-white jury sentenced him to death; the girlfriend got life. In 1999, my Black client Harvey Green was executed for killing two white people during a robbery. In fact, if you’d looked at my client list over the years, you’d think most of the violence in this country has been carried out by poor Black people — and that most of the victims were white.

However, in fighting against the death penalty, we at CDPL have necessarily steeped ourselves in the history of racial oppression in America. We understand the torturous journey from slavery to lynching and racial terror, to Jim Crow and the modern death penalty. Because we’ve studied this history, we know that much of the violence in our country has been carried out not by the people on death row, but by white people, some of them carrying badges or sitting in the highest positions of power, seeking to maintain the social order. And most of the people murdered in this country have never gotten justice.

This is what the Halifax County Courthouse looked like less than 50 years before my first client’s trial there:

This history is not distant.

Today, we see the legacy of racist violence in the death penalty, and also in the public executions of George Floyd and Armaud Arbery. In the killings of Philando Castile, Keith Scott, Eric Garner, Danquirs Franklin, and so many others. Too many others. My heart breaks for their families, and for our country that is still so poisoned by racism.

People work at CDPL because they believe in the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. We also believe deep in our bones that Black lives matter. And I want to make a few things clear:

  • We support the overwhelmingly peaceful and necessary protests against police violence.
  • We respect the leadership of Black-led organizations like Black Lives Matter, Emancipate NC, and the NAACP. We defer to them about the best way to stand up to racism and police violence in this moment.

CDPL will continue to fight against the racist state violence of the death penalty. But we also see that the death penalty is just one tool of oppression, and that we must be in solidarity with other movements for racial justice. To all who fight racism and oppression, we stand with you.

I hope we can turn our grief and pain into real change and that the strength of the ongoing protests will move our policy makers, courts, and public agencies to face and dismantle the systemic racism that has plagued the country for 400 years. I hope for concrete and meaningful reform. CDPL looks forward to working with all of you to make that happen.

Remembering Frank Wells

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CDPL Osborn Award 2018

Frank, third from left, receiving the Osborn Award in 2018 with his law partner, Jon Megerian.

North Carolina has lost a passionate and irreplaceable advocate. On Easter Sunday, renowned capital defense attorney and CDPL Board Vice-President Franklin E. Wells Jr. died suddenly at his home. He was 60. He left behind his wife, Gay, and their three daughters, Annah, Emily and Molly.

Frank was the longtime law partner of Jon Megerian. Together, they ran Megerian & Wells in Asheboro, taking on some of the region’s most difficult capital cases and saving their clients from the death penalty. In 2011, their zealous advocacy won a second-degree murder conviction for a man who overdosed on medications before killing eight people in a Carthage nursing home. And in 2006, they secured a life sentence for a man with severe mental illness who killed four people in Gaston County. In these and other cases, juries were swayed to eschew the death penalty by Frank and Jon’s tireless work to tell the whole story of their clients’ humanity and frailties. In 2018, Frank and Jon won CDPL’s J. Kirk Osborn Award for their decades of stellar lawyering and their commitment to training and mentoring other capital attorneys across North Carolina.

Frank was also involved in statewide litigation that exposed systemic racial inequities in jury selection. In February, he made a powerful argument before the N.C. Supreme Court, in which he urged the court to finally acknowledge racial discrimination against African American jurors. In his typical soft spoken style, he asked the court to reckon with North Carolina’s legacy of racism, and he led by example. He told the seven justices that his own family has lived in North Carolina since 1700 and that historical documents show his ancestors enslaved other human beings. “When I talk about the troubling, very uncomfortable history we have in this state with race, I’m talking about my history too. Until we confront our history of discrimination, we’re going to continue to have problems in this state.”

In addition to working closely with CDPL on many cases, Frank served on the CDPL board for more than a decade. “Frank was a wonderful lawyer and a terrific human being,” said CDPL Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel. “He saved lives in so many cases, and he was ever loyal to his clients. When his former client had a hearing in federal court recently, Frank came to court just to support him, even though it had been more than a decade since Frank represented him. He was a great teacher and donated countless hours to CDPL. Frank was always patient and kind; I respected him tremendously and I’m going to miss him terribly.”

Frank’s family has kindly asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to CDPL. Go here to donate in Frank’s memory.

Frank Wells

Frank showing off his Osborn Award

Covid-19 Update from CDPL

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CDPL is doing its part to help stop the spread of Covid-19. We have temporarily closed our office in downtown Durham, and all of our attorneys, investigators, and public education specialists are now working remotely. We have also temporarily ceased in-person client meetings to ensure that none of our staff carries the virus into a prison, where people are kept in confined spaces and are extraordinarily vulnerable to illness.

However, CDPL is continuing to fight vigorously for the rights of our clients. We are busy ensuring that employees have access to the technology they need to work on their cases from home. We’re also implementing systems to make sure that our clients can continue to contact their defense team members by mail and by telephone. We are continuously monitoring conditions at Central Prison and intervening on behalf of our clients when necessary. We are also reaching out to trial teams across the state and assisting them in obtaining continuances in light of the pandemic.

Our clients and the public can rest assured that CDPL will continue to zealously fight executions, now and in the future, and to advocate for an end to the cruel and unfair death penalty. You can continue to reach our staff by email and by calling our main phone line. 

Please also continue to check the blog of the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty for the latest news about the death penalty.

Contact Us

The Center for Death Penalty Litigation
123 West Main Street · Suite 700 · · ·
Durham, NC 27701
919-956-9545
cdpl@cdpl.org

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Please make a tax-deductible contribution to ensure truth and fairness in North Carolina's death penalty system.