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As 2021 ends, the NC death penalty is in retreat but remains a threat

December 17, 2021 By Kristin Collins

The death penalty continued its inevitable decline in 2021.

North Carolina marked its second year in a row without a single capital trial. The size of death row shrank slightly, as two more people had their flawed and unjust death sentences overturned by the courts. And the state began its sixteenth year without an execution.

Meanwhile, a jury awarded death row exonerees Henry McCollum and Leon Brown a historic $75 million settlement for their 30-plus years of wrongful imprisonment, arising from false confessions that law enforcement coerced from them when they were teenagers. And many on death row continued to pursue litigation under the state’s Racial Justice Act, which has revealed an epidemic of discrimination in death penalty cases. [Read CDPL’s comprehensive project on the origins of NC’s death penalty, Racist Roots.]

Nationwide, 26 states have now banned capital punishment or imposed an official moratorium on its use. Most notably, in 2021, Virginia became the first southern state to abolish the death penalty. Even among those states with the death penalty on the books, few are actively using it. Death sentences were imposed in just seven states this year, and only five states carried out an execution.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s new report, the handful of death sentences and executions this year were mostly concentrated in a few former slave states. And they continued the tradition of targeting the most vulnerable. Ten of the 11 people executed in 2021 had severe mental illness, intellectual disabilities, or experienced childhood trauma.

Two more innocent people were exonerated from America’s death rows this year, bringing the total to 186 since 1973. Unsurprisingly, a new Gallup poll showed that Americans’ support for the death penalty remains at historic lows.

However, the spree of federal executions that concluded in January reminds us that we cannot sit back and wait for the death penalty to quietly fade away. After a 17-year hiatus, the federal government executed 13 people in just a few months. The same could happen in North Carolina, where more than 130 people remain on death row and pending litigation is the only thing stopping their executions.

It’s time for North Carolina to stop holding on to the death penalty, a remnant of slavery that embarrasses our state and undermines efforts to address the roots of injustice or the epidemic of mass incarceration and police violence. It is a punishment that feeds off people’s instincts for violence and retribution, rather than building a safer and more just society. It creates trauma rather than healing.

As Durham capital defense attorney Jay Ferguson writes:

For much of my career, I dreaded the holiday season.

Early October brought numerous cert denials by the US Supreme Court, and the State of North Carolina wasted no time lining up our clients for execution. We spent the holidays standing in the darkness outside Central Prison, protesting this macabre practice of state-sanctioned killing and supporting our exhausted colleagues, who fought valiantly until they got the call that clemency was denied.

Having to tell your client that he is going to be executed is heart-wrenching. We attorneys were escorted to the cramped viewing room, shoulder-to-shoulder with law enforcement, reporters and victims’ family members, so our client could have a small bit of comfort, knowing at least one person present cared for him as he died.

The last 15 years have been markedly different. We can never go back to the way things used to be. I’m too old and tired to stand outside Central Prison at 2 a.m. with candle wax dripping on my shoes.

In 2022, we promise to work every day to place North Carolina among the growing list of states that have formally ended the racist and barbaric death penalty — and ensure that we never again sit by powerlessly while the state commits premeditated murder.

CDPL’s 2022 Osborn Awards: Honoring Steve Freedman & Gerda Stein

July 20, 2021 By Kristin Collins

CDPL is happy to honor Steve Freedman as the winner of the J. Kirk Osborn Award for outstanding leadership in capital defense. Last fall, because of the steep rise in Covid cases, we made the difficult decision to postpone the ceremony honoring Steve. It is now scheduled for April 2022. The rescheduled event will honor Steve. We will also celebrate longtime CDPL staff member Gerda Stein, with the Messenger of Hope Award for her extraordinary work as a mitigation investigator and communications specialist.

The in-person celebration will be April 14 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. in the outdoor courtyard at Parizade in Durham. Please register for the event here. Everyone who purchased tickets in the fall will be automatically signed up for our spring event. For those who are unable to come in person, we plan to record the awards portion and post it on our website. If you’d like to make a donation in honor of Steve or Gerda, you can do that here.

About Steve Freedman

Steve Freedman

Steve recently retired from the N.C. Office of the Capital Defender. All told, he spent 30 years as a public defender and worked several years as a staff attorney at CDPL. Steve has taken on the most difficult capital cases and persuaded juries to spare his clients’ lives. To cite just one example, in 2007, Steve represented Sam Cooper, who was accused in a Wake County crime spree that left five people dead. After a month-long trial in which Steve and his team presented compelling evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from horrendous childhood abuse, the jury voted for five life sentences instead of death. And Steve’s career is far from over. Despite his retirement, he recently agreed to take a Richmond County capital case, and he continues to assist on the case of a former client facing the death penalty in Pasquotank County.

To understand why we chose Steve for this honor, read this nomination letter from fellow capital defender Robert Singagliese:

The epitome of leading by example

Over the course of his career, Steve has done more for poor people charged with capital murder than most any attorney in the state.

Steve has been an excellent advocate at the trial level for his entire career for poor people charged with serious felonies. He has been a public defender in Columbus, OH; Cumberland County, NC; Orange County, NC; and the Eastern District of NC in the federal system. He also spent a number of years at CDPL. Finally, he has spent about 15 years at the Office of the Capital Defender in Durham, where we worked together. He has tried eight capital trials, only one of which resulted in a death sentence. While not a very vocal member of the bar, I believe Steve is the epitome of leading by example.

In my four and a half years at OCD, I have had the incredible opportunity to work with Steve on three capital cases. (We also tried a non-capital case together that thrillingly resulted in an acquittal.) His care for his clients is obvious. In his earliest meetings with his clients, he lets them know that our job is going to be to learn everything we can about them, so that by the time a case has reached its conclusion we know more about our clients than they do. That is a fine explanation of mitigation work. That introduction also lets our clients know from the beginning that the case is not about the lawyers, and it’s not about the crime. Our work is about them.

The last of the three capital cases I mentioned ended just recently. In that case, our client cared less about his life than we did. (Indeed, he told the judge at his sentencing hearing that he was dissatisfied with his lawyers because we delayed the case and prevented him from getting the death penalty.) While capital trial work is always demanding and frustrating, it was even harder with a client who refused to cooperate with his defense team. Yet, Steve didn’t give up, and with some creative litigation and a lot of patience, we were able to maneuver the case into a posture that allowed it to be resolved without a capital trial.

As for teamwork, it’s obvious that Steve is the “first chair” in essentially any setting in which he finds himself. Yet he doesn’t make the other members of his team feel that way. He encourages participation from fellow attorneys, investigators, and experts. I’ve also seen him switch his own gears and focus based on the input of others, a sign that he’s not just being polite about a team approach. He sincerely appreciates that every member of the team has something to contribute.

I have also watched Steve work with several junior members of the capital defense community, including myself. I owe much of what I have learned since joining this office to Steve. I have no doubt that other lawyers have had a similar experience.

Finally, a short anecdote. Two years ago, Steve tried a non-capital murder case in Durham. The State never made a plea offer, and the facts were not good for Steve’s client. Steve’s defense brought forward evidence of legitimate mental health issues, including intellectual disability, Bipolar disorder, and intoxication. Before sitting down at the end of his closing argument, knowing that the State would have last argument, Steve choked up a bit and asked the members of the jury for someone to be his client’s advocate in the jury room. He asked for someone to stand up for D’Marlo, because Steve wasn’t going to be allowed to stand up again. It was clear how much Steve cared about his client. What more could a client ask for?

About Gerda Stein

In January 2022, one of North Carolina’s most dedicated advocates, Gerda Stein, left 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 left an indelible mark on our movement — and whose kindness touched many people who faced execution:

On the hard days and the joyful ones, Gerda was there

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.

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.

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.

If we value racial equity, we must end the death penalty

November 12, 2020 By Kristin Collins

The N.C. Task Force for Racial Equity in the Criminal Justice System was established in June in the wake of widespread protests against police brutality and racism. It was established by Gov. Cooper and is made up of 24 people from a wide range of backgrounds. The task force will recommend policy changes and reforms of North Carolina’s criminal punishment system.

On September 15, CDPL’s Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel addressed a working group of the task force. These are her remarks.

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to speak to all of you who have donated your time to work on these important issues. My name is Gretchen Engel and I’m the executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. I came to North Carolina in 1992, fresh out of law school, when Henderson Hill gave me a job in capital defense. Over the years, I had the good fortune to work with Mary Pollard as well.

One of my first death row clients was Quentin Jones. Quentin was 18 years old at the time of the robbery and murder that landed him on death row.

Seventeen years ago this August, I watched the State of N.C. execute Quentin. He was then 34 years old.

Quentin Jones

After his execution, I learned that one of the jurors in his case had been interviewed by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, my alma mater. This is what the juror said about Quentin: He was a typical n—-r. You know, if he’d been white, I would’ve had a different attitude.

Another client of mine, Robert Bacon, was tried by an all-white jury for the murder of a white man named Glennie Clark. Robert’s codefendant, Bonnie Clark was white. Bonnie was married to Glennie Clark and she was having an affair with Robert. It was Bonnie’s idea to kill Glennie and she lured him to the site of his death.

This is what a juror told me about the sentencing deliberations in Robert’s case: Blacks commit more crime. It’s typical of Blacks to be involved in crime. He shouldn’t have been dating that white woman. He was wrong to do that. And he deserves the death penalty. Thankfully, the Governor commuted Robert’s death sentence to life.

Robert Bacon

After doing this work for nearly 30 years, and seeing countless examples like these, the racism of the death penalty is very real and very personal.

I was asked to talk about the cost of the death penalty. There are a couple of ways to think about cost. One is just to count up the money. Another is to think about what we get for the money. Dollars. Value.

We know the death penalty costs a lot of money. Dr. Phil Cook at Duke University did a study showing how much — $11 million a year. Note that Dr. Cook focused on defense costs. His estimate does not include resources the Office of the Appellate Defender and the North Carolina Supreme Court could devote to other things, the extra time spent by prosecutors in capital cases, or the costs to taxpayers for federal appeals.

So what are we getting for our money? Not a lot. North Carolina has nearly 140 people on death row. Almost 90 of them have been there for 10, 20, 30, or more years. In the past decade, we’ve sentenced only 11 people to death. Looking at the past decade, you’ll see that most years we’ve spent at least $11 million dollars to obtain one or zero death sentences. Meanwhile, our last execution was in 2006, 14 years ago.

Some would say justice is priceless. There is no price on justice. One question then is, how well does this system operate? I suggest to you that if the death penalty system were the airlines, no one would fly. We’d all be too terrified.

A national study of capital sentencing between1973-1995 looked at error rates in capital sentencing. Researchers at Columbia University analyzed nearly a quarter century of data, looked at appellate reversals for serious constitutional error. Nationally, the error rate was 68%, nearly seven out of ten. North Carolina’s error rate was 71%. Truly, the death penalty is the Ford Pinto in our criminal justice tool box.

Most disturbing is how wrong we get it. Henry McCollum spent more than 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. He and his brother Leon Brown were exonerated by DNA evidence in 2014. Because of Henry’s wrongful conviction, and the years it took to figure that out – thank goodness we didn’t execute him in the meantime – the family of Sabrina Buie, the 11-year-old girl who was killed, has never received justice.

Henry McCollum was one of 10 men wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in NC. The others were Sam Poole, Christopher Spicer, Alfred Rivera, Alan Gell, Jonathon Hoffman, Glen Chapman, Levon Jones, Henry McCollum, Leon Brown, and Charles Finch.

Nothing about the death penalty apparatus operates with surgical precision. Yet it is eerily good at targeting Black people. Eight of these 10 men were Black. One was Latino. Nine of 10 were people of color. Collectively, these men spent 155 years in prison for crimes other people committed.

Innocent people are disproportionately people of color. The same is true of other vulnerable populations. Of the people on North Carolina’s death row when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to execute people who committed their crimes as children, under the age of 18, three of four were Black. Of the people on our death row when North Carolina barred the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, 16 of 18 were people of color.

Chief Justice Beasley recently observed: In our courts, African-Americans are more harshly treated, more severely punished and more likely to be presumed guilty. The death penalty was conceived as punishment for the “worst of the worst.” Worst crimes, worst people. Most calculated and most cruel killings, committed by the most depraved.

Our “modern” death penalty was supposed to be rational, not arbitrary. Getting the death penalty was not supposed to be like being struck by lightning. And, actually, it isn’t. More often, it simply strikes people who are Black. Let’s look at marginal cases, cases that don’t seem to be the “worst of the worst.”

Consider the people on our death row even though they did not personally kill the victim. They were non-shooters, non-triggermen. Of the people who have been sentenced to death in North Carolina who were not the actual killers, four of four were people of color.

Consider the people on death row whom the jury found did not premeditate and deliberate the murder, people who were convicted only of felony murder. Seven of seven in this group are people of color.

Let me go back for a minute to what Chief Justice Beasley said about African Americans being more harshly punished. In fact, the Blacker you are, the more harshly you will be punished.

A 2006 study by Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt showed that murderers with stereotypically “Black-looking” features are more than twice as likely to get the death penalty as lighter skinned Black defendants.

In 2001, when Robert Bacon had an execution date, I interviewed Bonnie Clark’s lawyer. The lawyer was a former prosecutor and a prominent civil lawyer when I spoke to him 13 years after Bonnie enlisted Robert in the plot to kill her husband. I asked him why he thought Bonnie got life and Robert got death. Here’s what he said: You know what I think happened? Robert Bacon is a very dark skinned black man, very dark skinned, pure Negro. She was white. The victim was white. To tell you the truth, that’s what I think happened, that’s what I think the jury thought about.

At the point he told me this, I hadn’t yet told him what the juror said about how Robert had no business running around with a white woman.

Shirley Burns had two sons. One of them is Marcus Robinson. When Marcus was 18, he killed a 17-year-old white boy. Marcus was sentenced to death. The other was Curtis Green. Curtis was murdered. Nobody went to death row for that murder.

When it comes to the death penalty, white lives matter. In 2016, FBI data showed the homicide rate for Black victims was nearly four times the national average and more than six times that of whites. Consistently, Black people make up the majority of murder victims.

But the death penalty is imposed as a punishment for killings of white people. A 2001 UNC study of homicides between 1993 and 1997 showed the odds of receiving the death penalty in NC were 3.5 times higher when the victim was white. A 2010 study by Michigan State University showed defendants charged with murder in NC from 1990 to 2009 were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty if the victim was white.

I wish what I’ve told you today were new. But it’s not. Today the Death Penalty Information Center released its report on the history of race and the death penalty. The title of the report is Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Next month, my office will launch a web-based project called Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty. What I’ve told you today is an old story. As Rev. Barber says, “The link between slavery, Jim Crow, lynching and the death penalty is as connected as the intertwined ropes of the lynchman’s noose.”

We are at a momentous time in our history. We have to ask ourselves, what do we value? The death penalty is irrevocable punishment. If we continue to tinker with it, we will execute an innocent person. How could we not?

The death penalty experiment in NC has been going on for more than 40 years. We’ve yet to come even close to eliminating the taint of race. It’s time. If we value racial equity, we cannot maintain the death penalty.

Watch CDPL’s 2020 Osborn Award Celebration

October 23, 2020 By Kristin Collins

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.

Listen to a radio interview about Racist Roots

October 21, 2020 By Kristin Collins

Thanks to N.C. Policy Watch for helping us get the word out about our ambitious new project, Racist Roots. They recently interviewed Kristin Collins, CDPL’s associate director of public information, about how Racist Roots came to be and what it’s all about. Please listen to this 15-minute interview to understand why this project means so much to us.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

Thank you to CDPL’s 2020 Osborn Award Sponsors

October 7, 2020 By Kristin Collins

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

October 5, 2020 By Kristin Collins

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

September 25, 2020 By Kristin Collins

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

September 21, 2020 By Kristin Collins

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

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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.

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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

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

June 3, 2020 By Kristin Collins

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.

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