Help us celebrate this year’s Osborn & Messenger of Light Award winners

August 1, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Please join CDPL on Tuesday, Sept. 26 to honor some of the most talented and steadfast people in our fight against the death penalty. We will celebrate the contributions of two extraordinary capital defense attorneys, Marilyn Ozer and the late Bill Massengale, the 2023 winners of the Osborn Award. We will also honor Patricia Carrington for her many years of service at Central Prison’s Visitation Department. Officer Carrington will receive the Messenger of Light Award. Read about our award winners here.

We will also have a very special guest, best-selling novelist and lawyer, John Grisham!

The event will be from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Durham’s Parizade. Wine, heavy hors d’oeuvres, and dessert will be served. Other drinks are available for purchase.

Please consider sponsoring our event this year. In addition to supporting our work, your gift permits CDPL to offer discounted tickets to guests who might not otherwise be able to attend – exonerees, people who’ve recently come home after time in prison, family members of our awardees, and newer members of our community. Please choose one of these sponsorship levels:

Benefactor — $2,000 (includes 5 tickets)
Champion — $1,000 (includes 4 tickets)
Defender — $500 (includes 3 tickets)
Advocate — $250 (includes 2 tickets)

Sponsors at the Benefactor, Champion, and Defender levels will have an opportunity to meet personally with John Grisham and our awardees and even take photos!

Please note: To avoid excessive fees, we have chosen not to allow credit card payments through the registration site. If you’d like to pay by credit card, please register first and then go to our Donate page to make your payment.

Meet Our Special Guest: John Grisham

John Grisham is the author of forty-seven bestselling books, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Judge’s List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.

Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.

When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.

John lives on a farm in central Virginia.

Meet CDPL’s 2023 award winners

August 1, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Each year, we give an award in honor of J. Kirk Osborn, one of the giants of North Carolina’s capital defense community, whose advocacy and deep compassion for his clients saved many lives and inspired other attorneys to follow in his footsteps. We also give the Messenger of Light Award to people who make significant contributions to our work and our clients.

The J. Kirk Osborn Award: Marilyn Ozer and Bill Massengale

The winners of the 2023 J. Kirk Osborn Award for outstanding leadership in capital defense are the extraordinarily deserving duo of Marilyn Ozer and Bill Massengale. Marilyn and Bill were longtime law partners who saved many people from execution, freed a client who had been sentenced to death based on extremely questionable evidence, and worked to address racism in their home town of Chapel Hill. Their partnership lasted until Bill’s death in December. His family will accept his award posthumously.

Over three decades of working on capital cases, Bill and Marilyn were on the front lines of the fight against North Carolina’s death penalty. They endured the heartbreaking executions of two clients, William “Bugs” Powell and Ronnie Frye. Mr. Frye’s case was particularly painful, since his trial lawyer drank through the trial and never presented evidence that could have swayed the jury to vote for life. Bill and Marilyn dug up compelling evidence that jurors never heard, including a photograph of Mr. Frye when he was a bruised and battered nine-year-old child. Local law enforcement authorities had used the photo to train staff in recognizing signs of child abuse. Tragically, during North Carolina’s decades of rapid-fire executions, the courts shrugged their shoulders.

However, during those same years, Bill and Marilyn also saw many successes that saved the lives of clients who might otherwise have been executed. In 1993, they won a remand from the US Supreme Court in the case of Marvin Williams. Ultimately, Mr. Williams’ life was spared because of his intellectual disability. Mr. Williams never forgot Bill and Marilyn and regularly sent them beautiful artwork he had created. Numerous other clients were either removed from death row or avoided death sentences thanks to Bill and Marilyn’s expert case work and knack for building trust with their clients.

More recently, they represented Mike Ryan, who spent seven years on death row after being convicted based on falsified DNA evidence. Because of Bill and Marilyn’s dogged investigation into both the flawed DNA evidence and the bullying of several alibi witnesses, Mr. Ryan was granted a new trial in 2017. However, the State appealed, and Marilyn successfully argued the case in the NC Supreme Court in 2019. Finally, in March of this year, the prosecutor agreed to settle the case for second-degree murder and a sentence very close to time served. Mr. Ryan was freed in May and is living in Florida with his fiancee.

Bill and Marilyn were also involved in suing the Chapel Hill Police Department for the racist 1990 “Readi-Rock” raid in which dozens of law-abiding Black club patrons were illegally searched and arrested by police wearing black masks and camouflage. Many in the club believed they were being robbed by vigilantes. Shortly before Bill’s death, the town of Chapel Hill formally apologized for the raid.

Through all their years of practice, Bill and Marilyn’s empathy for their clients was boundless. They remained good-humored and relentless in their fight for justice. Marilyn continues to represent clients facing the death penalty and serves as a consultant to capital trial lawyers throughout the state.

The Messenger of Light Award: Patricia Carrington

Patricia Carrington retired in June after 25 years as a correctional officer at Central Prison. During her more than two decades of service, she became known as a beacon of compassion and kindness, both to the people inside and to the many people who passed through the prison’s gates. She is the winner of CDPL’s Messenger of Light Award.

Ms. Carrington was hired at Central Prison in 1998, and her first assignment landed her in the Segregation Unit, where prisoners deemed too difficult for general population are kept in solitary confinement. From the beginning, her philosophy was simple: “You give respect, you get respect.” She believed in doing her job with integrity, but her job was not to judge or to punish.

She worked in virtually every part of the prison, from supervising the dining hall to accompanying residents on their visits to hospitals. Rather than standing aloof and afraid in a corner, she chatted and joked with people. As one incarcerated person described it, “You treat us like we’re human.”

She developed a special bond with many of the people on death row. She came to believe that anyone in their circumstances might have ended up in the same position. “I realized a lot of the people there could’ve been my son or my husband, so you want to treat them like you’d want an officer to treat your family.”

In 2001, she was assigned to the prison’s visitation unit and became a fixture not just for the people receiving visits, but for the families and legal teams who came to see them. Lawyers and investigators knew her as the first face to greet them, treating them with both professionalism and a personal touch. Families knew her as the person who would bring an elderly visitor a chair or offer words of advice and consolation after a difficult visit.

She watched parents age and children grow into adults. She remembers one couple who traveled a long distance every week to visit their son on death row. As the years passed, the father developed Alzheimers and became too sickly to visit. Then, the mother’s visits became irregular and finally stopped. “I saw how much of a toll it had taken on her over the years. Not only were these guys serving time, their families were too.”

Ms. Carrington also had to witness the heartbreak of executions. A visitation officer was assigned to remain on duty late into the night to admit families and legal teams for their final visits. She watched through glass as parents were allowed to hug their child for the first time in decades, knowing it would also be the last time.

When she started at Central Prison, she believed that anyone on death row deserved to be there. But her views changed during 25 years on the job, as she saw dozens of death sentences overturned because of mistakes or falsified evidence. She was there when Alan Gell was exonerated in 2004 and again when Henry McCollum walked free in 2014. It had taken him more than 30 years to prove his innocence. “You stop and you think, how many innocent people were put on death row that should have never been? How many were actually executed?”

Ms. Carrington said that, when she first applied for a job at Central Prison, she thought of it as a joke. She figured she had no chance of being hired. “I never thought I would work in a prison, but the experience and the understanding I gained, I would not trade it for anything in the world.” Ms. Carrington is a teacher for all of us on how to remain human even in the most inhumane of places.

Ending the death penalty makes us all more free

March 23, 2023 By Kristin Collins

In March, our director of public information, Kristin Collins, was asked to give a sermon about the death penalty at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, where she is a member. She told a very personal story of how she learned the truth about our state’s deeply racist criminal punishment system and made a compelling argument for why every North Carolinian should join the grassroots movement to end the death penalty. It was a good reminder that, as Kristin said, “Whether we accept or reject the death penalty is not about what happens to other people. It’s about who we are and the kind of world we want to live in.”

We hope you’ll take the time to watch Kristin’s talk, which lasts about ten minutes. It is followed by a very moving sermon by our friend Andre Smith, who told the story of losing his son to murder and then committing his life to ending the death penalty and working with men in prison, helping them turn their lives around. Once you’ve listened, I hope you will be inspired to get more involved in the growing grassroots effort to ask Gov. Cooper to commute North Carolina’s death sentences to prison terms.

Kristin describes it this way:

I can tell you from personal experience that we’re building a joyful movement of people who believe a better world is possible. And whether or not we convince North Carolina’s politicians to abolish the death penalty, I know that being part of this work has allowed me to become a little more free. It has allowed me to let go of that old punishment mindset and see that most of the things wrong in the world are better solved with love and compassion. It has allowed me to be a little less quick to judge — and to recognize that we all have the potential to do harm and to repair.

Learn more about the campaign and how to get involved here.

Death row case with all-white jury to be heard this week in the N.C. Supreme Court

February 6, 2023 By Kristin Collins

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb. 6, 2023
For more information contact: Gretchen M. Engel, gretchen@cdpl.org, (919) 682-3983

RALEIGH, NC — On Feb. 8, the North Carolina Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Russell Tucker, a Black man who was sentenced to death in 1996 by an all-white jury in Forsyth County and remains on death row. His attorneys will present evidence that prosecutors excluded Black citizens from the jury because of their race, in violation of federal law.

“The exclusion of Black people from juries is a long-standing problem in North Carolina stretching back to the days of Jim Crow,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which represents Mr. Tucker. “But rarely is the evidence so clear as in Mr. Tucker’s case. The prosecutor cited vague and nonsensical justifications to remove one Black citizen after another from the jury, belittling them in open court and denying them the right to serve in a life-and-death trial.”

Mr. Tucker’s is one of four cases to be heard in the state Supreme Court Wednesday, all of which involve evidence that citizens were excluded from juries based on race. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky that it is unconstitutional to remove a juror because of race. However, the law has gone largely unenforced in North Carolina. Until 2022, a North Carolina conviction had never been overturned because of discrimination against a juror of color.

The lack of enforcement allowed prosecutors to strike Black and Brown jurors with impunity. About half of the 137 people on North Carolina’s death row were convicted by juries that were all white or had only a single person of color.

In Mr. Tucker’s case, the prosecutor removed all five Black citizens from the jury pool. When questioned about the strikes, he cited vague reasons such as the jurors’ body language or failure to make eye contact. He said one juror was “monosyllabic” because he responded to yes-no questions with only a single word.

He said that a Black working mother who had lived her whole life in Forsyth County had no “stake in the community” because she rented her home, wasn’t registered to vote, and her spouse had been at his job for only four months. The judge allowed this strike, even though the prosecutor accepted a white juror who was also a renter, five white jurors who were not registered to vote, and two white jurors whose spouses were unemployed.

Mr. Tucker’s attorneys later discovered that many of these reasons were taken directly from a handout given to prosecutors during a training session. This handout provided a list of excuses prosecutors could draw from to disguise their race-based jury strikes.

Juries lacking racial diversity have been shown to convict more easily and sentence more people to death, sometimes in cases where the defendants are innocent. In 1997, Alfred Rivera was tried capitally by the same Forsyth County prosecutor who tried Mr. Tucker’s case. Two years after being sentenced to death, Mr. Rivera was exonerated and freed. Mr. Rivera, who is Latino, said that during jury selection for his trial, he watched the prosecutor work to remove people of color, especially young men.

“The prosecutor used every excuse to get rid of people who might understand and relate to me,” Rivera said. “I ended up with a jury that couldn’t see me as a person. To them, I was just a ‘usual suspect’ and it was easy to believe I was guilty. Because I didn’t have a jury of my peers, I spent two years on death row for a crime I didn’t commit.”

Rev. James Baker of Clayton, a leader in the Johnston County branch of the NAACP, said he is troubled at the evidence that Black people continue to be excluded from juries. “Black people deserve to have their voices heard, both in the ballot box and in the courtroom,” Baker said. “Discrimination on juries is yet another way that the death penalty’s legacy of white supremacy continues today. As Dr. King said, ‘Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’”

Racist jury strikes go on trial in the NC Supreme Court

February 1, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Russell Tucker’s case will be heard Feb. 8 in the NC Supreme Court

Russell Tucker was a Black man facing the death penalty in the South in the “tough-on-crime” 1990s. He deserved the chance to be tried by a jury of his peers — people who might have had similar life experiences and been able to see him as something other than a one-dimensional “monster.” However, a Forsyth County prosecutor stole that chance at justice, which is supposed to be guaranteed by law.

The prosecutor came up with reason after reason why Black people could not remain on the jury. They were “monosyllabic.” They “didn’t make eye contact.” They “lacked a stake in the community.” One by one, the court allowed the prosecutor to send all the Black jurors home. Russell Tucker ended up with an all-white jury that did exactly as the prosecution asked: They deemed a young Black man unworthy of life.

Mr. Tucker, who has been on North Carolina’s death row since 1996, is represented by CDPL Senior Attorney Elizabeth Hambourger, along with co-counsel Tom Maher. On Feb. 8, Ms. Hambourger will argue before the North Carolina Supreme Court that racism illegally shaped Mr. Tucker’s jury. Details about how to attend or watch the arguments are here.

The issue before the court is not whether Mr. Tucker committed a terrible crime; he has admitted to killing a security guard outside a Kmart during a desperate and drug-fueled time in his life. Instead, the issue is whether our state will allow brazen racism in death penalty trials.

The racism we’re talking about doesn’t just affect people on trial for their lives, though all-white juries have been shown to convict more easily, even when defendants are innocent, and to sentence more people to death. Jury discrimination also deprives citizens of their Constitutional right to wield power in our democratic system.

In Mr. Tucker’s case, one working mother showed up for jury service only to be told in open court that she had no “stake in the community.” She’d lived her entire life in Forsyth County and was raising her children there, but the prosecutor pointed out that she rented her home, was not registered to vote, and her husband had been at his job “for only four months.” The judge allowed this strike, even though the prosecutor accepted a white juror who was also a renter, five white jurors who were not registered to vote, and two white jurors whose spouses were unemployed.

The state’s message was so clear they could’ve written it on a billboard: Black people don’t deserve a voice in our community.

The exclusion of Black jurors is not just a problem in Mr. Tucker’s case. It’s a statewide phenomenon in both capital and noncapital cases. It’s a particularly strong tradition in Forsyth County, where a recent Wake Forest University study found that prosecutors were three times more likely to strike African Americans than white jurors. Mr. Tucker is one of four people sent to death row by all-white Forsyth County juries.

The very same prosecutor who struck all the Black jurors in Mr. Tucker’s case also tried Henry White for his life. Mr. White was recently released from prison after his lawyers presented evidence that jurors were excluded because of their race.

This discrimination is not an accident. Prosecutors are trained for it.

Years after Mr. Tucker’s trial, his defense team found out the trial prosecutor had attended a training seminar where prosecutors were given a list of excuses they could draw from when they were asked to explain their exclusion of Black jurors. The list was full of dubious reasons including being disheveled, evasive, rebellious, or having an “air of defiance.”

These reasons were not just vague, subjective, and designed to disguise the prosecutors’ true motives; they were also rooted in racism. Bryan Stevenson described them as “derogatory labels applied to African Americans who did not show adequate deference to the prevailing racial order.”

At Mr. Tucker’s trial, the prosecutor read verbatim from this list when striking Black jurors. He accused one man of having “absolutely horrible” body language. He accused another of being “confused” and “monosyllabic” because he answered a list of yes-no questions with yes-no answers. Imagine showing up to court to do your civic duty and being talked about this way in public.

On Feb. 8, our state’s highest court has a chance to stop the degradation of Black citizens, which continues in our courtrooms today. The court must send a strong message that all North Carolinians have an equal right to a voice in our courtrooms.

In 2022, our successes gave us hope: We will end the NC death penalty

December 21, 2022 By Kristin Collins

At an August vigil outside Central Prison, we marked sixteen years since NC’s last execution (Photo by Brandon Smith)

At the end of each year, we reflect on the state of the death penalty and our work to end it. In its recent report, the Death Penalty Information Center called 2022 the “Year of the Botched Execution.” As we watched several states carry out grisly, prolonged, and sometimes failed executions, we were reminded again of the death penalty’s cruelty. We were also deeply grateful that North Carolina has passed another year without the horror of an execution.

In August, we were proud to stand in vigil alongside our partners in the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NCCADP) to mark the 16th anniversary of North Carolina’s last execution. We read the names of all 43 people executed in the modern era of our state’s death penalty, and stated our fervent hope that no more names would be added.

However, 2022 also reminded us of the death penalty’s staying power. Capital trials resumed after a long pandemic pause and two new people were sentenced to death. We end the year with 137 people on death row, the fifth largest in the nation. The results of November’s judicial elections will make it challenging for our clients to win relief on appeal.

Yet, this year was full of successes that leave us feeling more hopeful than ever that CDPL’s work is making a difference, and that we will end this barbaric and racist punishment. Some of our successes came in the courts:

In February, we saw the result of years of work to shine a light on the courts’ failure to root out race discrimination, when our Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Christopher Clegg because a Wake County prosecutor illegally excluded a Black citizen from his jury. The Clegg decision marked the first time the NC’s appellate courts have found intentional discrimination against a juror of color and reversed a conviction.

In May, we celebrated the release of Henry White, who was sentenced to life without parole 25 years ago at a capital trial infected by racism. CDPL challenged the race discrimination in jury selection, and ultimately was able to work out a plea agreement that overturned the conviction and gave Mr. White his freedom. It was a heartwarming day because all sides, including the family of the victim and the prosecutor, agreed that it was time for Mr. White to be released. He is now rebuilding his life.

Other victories came in the realm of advocacy, education, and movement building:

We released the film adaptation of our project Racist Roots, providing a powerful tool to educate audiences about the North Carolina death penalty’s deep entanglement with slavery, lynching and segregation — and to inspire them to join the movement to transform the criminal legal system. The film includes the voices of advocates, artists, exonerees, and people on North Carolina’s death row. CDPL, along with NCCADP, hosted dozens of screenings across the state this year. In November, nearly 150 people attended the film’s public launch in Durham.

We saw the grassroots movement to end the death penalty grow by leaps and bounds this year. We are a proud partner of NCCADP, and we worked closely with them on many community building events this year. Our joint efforts culminated in a December 10 march that drew nearly 200 people to the gates of Gov. Cooper’s mansion, calling on him to commute the sentences of people on death row.

In 2023, CDPL will continue its work both in the courtroom and in the community, seeking to end jury discrimination and prevent death sentences and executions. We will spread the message as far and wide as humanly possible: The death penalty is unjust, error-prone, and racist to its core.

We are set to begin a new phase of litigation under the Racial Justice Act, which could have broad implications for North Carolina’s death row. We will also continue to take Racist Roots across the state, using it as a tool to persuade state leaders that they must take action to end the death penalty. Progress never moves as quickly as we’d like it to, but there is no question we’re moving in the right direction, working alongside so many devoted colleagues, partners, and friends.

The Racist Roots film is now available for all. Please watch, share & help make the death penalty history!

November 16, 2022 By Kristin Collins

CDPL’s powerful new 25-minute film traces the NC death penalty’s deep entanglement with slavery, lynching and racism — and inspires people to join the movement to transform our state’s criminal legal system. CDPL and the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty have been hosting private facilitated viewings of Racist Roots since the spring, but the film is now available for all to see. It includes the stories and voices of advocates, artists, exonerees, and people on North Carolina’s death row. It is a key tool as we strive to educate the public about the injustices of the death penalty and end this cruel punishment. Please help us share it!

Discussion Guide

This film covers hundreds of years of history, some of it deeply disturbing. Whether you watch the film alone or in a group, we suggest that you take a few minutes to breathe and absorb the information. A few suggested questions for reflection:

Before you watch the film, spend a few moments reflecting on what you already know, feel and believe about the death penalty. After you’ve watched, what in the film confirmed what you already thought and why? Were there stories in the film that challenged your beliefs?
How does your own racial identity and life experience influence how you see this film?
Which of the stories in the film surprised you or made you feel something? Why?
Why does what happened decades or even centuries ago matter to the modern death penalty? And why is ending the death penalty a key part of reforming our state’s criminal legal system?
Now that you have this information, what do you plan to do? Who will you share it with? What actions will you take? (Some possible answers are below.)

Help spread the message of Racist Roots

Request a facilitated screening and discussion of the Racist Roots film, either for yourself or for your organization or community group.

Download a Racist Roots fact sheet to print or share.

Explore RacistRoots.org, CDPL’s 2020 project on which the film is based. The website includes essays, photos, videos & original artwork by nearly two dozen contributors.

Get plugged in to the grassroots movement led by the NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. CDPL is a member of this powerful organization that is committed to ending the racist death penalty.

Donate to CDPL to help us continue to spread the message of Racist Roots and represent people facing execution.

Learn more about the death penalty nationwide. If you live outside North Carolina, please get involved with local organizations fighting for racial justice, abolition of the death penalty, and a reimagined justice system. If you need help identifying a local group, contact us:

New film traces racist links of NC’s death penalty & makes an urgent call to end it

November 10, 2022 By Kristin Collins

CDPL to host the public launch of Racist Roots at Durham’s Carolina Theatre

For Immediate Release: November 10, 2022
For More Information Contact: Gretchen M. Engel, CDPL, gretchen@cdpl.org, (919) 682-3983

DURHAM, NC — On Tuesday, Nov. 15, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation will host the public launch of its powerful new film Racist Roots, which traces the modern North Carolina death penalty’s connections to slavery, lynching, and segregation.

“It’s unacceptable that, sixteen years after North Carolina’s last execution, we still have the nation’s fourth largest death row and are still trying people for their lives,” said CDPL Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel. “The death penalty grows out of a racist history, and it continues to skew the system toward extreme punishments that fall disproportionately on communities of color. This film will help people across North Carolina see the urgent need to eliminate the death penalty from our state’s criminal punishment system.”

The film is based on CDPL’s online project RacistRoots.org, which was released in 2020. It includes the stories and voices of people on North Carolina’s death row, as well as artists, historians, and advocates. CDPL worked with professional filmmakers who created original music and animation for the screen. (See a trailer here.)

CDPL, along with the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, has been screening Racist Roots for small private audiences since the spring. Now, the film will be publicly available as a resource for all who seek to understand the death penalty’s history and its continuing racial disparities.

The free screening is from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Carolina Theatre in downtown Durham. (Details & registration here.) The film runs 25 minutes and will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by nationally recognized advocate Henderson Hill, CDPL’s founder and currently a senior attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project.

“The death penalty’s history is inseparable from our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration,” Hill says in the film. “Even as the number of executions and death sentences declines, it remains a powerful symbol of white supremacy. When we open our eyes to the history of capital punishment, the conclusion becomes inescapable. The death penalty is just one more Confederate monument that we must tear down.”

Panelists include:

Exoneree Alfred Rivera, who spent two years on NC’s death row in the 1990s for a murder he did not commit. During Rivera’s time on death row, four people were executed. In 1999, his conviction was overturned and, at a second trial, a jury found him not guilty. Rivera now works as the Lived Experience Coordinator for the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to uplift the voices of people directly affected by the death penalty.
State Rep. Vernetta Alston, a former CDPL attorney who represented Henry McCollum, an innocent man who spent more than thirty years on NC’s death row before being exonerated in 2014. She is now a state legislator committed to shining a light on the injustice of the death penalty.
Filmmaker Akili Brown, the director of Racist Roots. Brown is a designer, actor and director who has starred in several stage productions and now runs his own production company, The Universal Fresh. He will speak about the role of art in movements for social change.

“Racist Roots makes clear that the death penalty is a relic of North Carolina’s deeply racist past,” Engel said. “It’s time to move toward a future that focuses on justice and healing, and not perpetuating racism through state-sanctioned killing.”

Beginning on Wednesday, Nov. 16, find the full film at RacistRoots.org/film.

Let’s make the death penalty history!

September 30, 2022 By Kristin Collins

Join us for the public launch of the Racist Roots film at the Carolina Theatre

On Tuesday, Nov. 15, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, CDPL will host the public launch of Racist Roots, the film based on CDPL’s online project, RacistRoots.org. This powerful 25-minute film explores the NC death penalty’s deep entanglement with slavery, lynching and racism — and inspires people to join the movement to transform our state’s criminal legal system. CDPL and the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty have been hosting private facilitated viewings of Racist Roots since the spring, but we plan to release the film publicly at this event, which includes a screening followed by a panel discussion. The panel will include one of the filmmakers, a capital defense attorney turned state legislator, and an innocent man who spent years on NC’s death row. It will be moderated by longtime civil rights advocate and CDPL founder Henderson Hill, who is currently a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project.

The event is free but we ask that you REGISTER HERE. Sponsorships are available, or if you’d like to support our work to spread the message of Racist Roots in any amount, please donate here.

Our Panelists

Akili Brown, Director of the Racist Roots film

Watch the Racist Roots trailers

Remembering Marcus Robinson, who helped expose death penalty’s racism

July 1, 2022 By Kristin Collins

Earlier this month, Marcus Robinson was found dead in his cell at Scotland Correctional Institution. The prison ruled it a suicide. He was 49 and had spent his entire adult life, as well as a good chunk of his childhood, in prison. His death didn’t make the news. But for those who worked on Marcus’ case for decades, it was a tragic reminder of our criminal punishment system’s failure to create even a semblance of justice.

Marcus grew up with many loving relatives and a strong, supportive mother, but an abusive father inflicted trauma from a young age. Yet, a racist system treated him like an incorrigible monster rather than a child in need of healing. He ended up in juvenile prison, a cruel system reserved almost exclusively for Black children, which makes people more likely to be incarcerated as adults.

Marcus was barely 18 years old when he played a role in a robbery that left 17-year-old Erik Tornblom dead. At his 1994 trial for Tornblom’s murder, Marcus was portrayed as a cold-blooded Black man on the hunt for a white victim. Prosecutors intentionally removed Black jurors who might have been more likely to see Marcus as human. Marcus soon became the youngest person on death row, and a new cycle of trauma began.

In 2007, Marcus was 12 hours away from execution before litigation over the state’s lethal injection protocol led to a stay. He’d already had his veins examined in preparation for the fatal injection, and already said goodbye to his family in what he thought was their final visit.

A few years later, Marcus’ case became the first to be tried under the North Carolina Racial Justice Act. In 2012, Judge Gregory Weeks ruled that prosecutors intentionally and systematically removed Black citizens from Marcus’ jury. Judge Weeks said Marcus had also proven that such discrimination was happening in capital cases across North Carolina.

It was a historic victory that brought to light decades of racism in death penalty trials, and Marcus was resentenced to life without parole. But even that victory was snatched away when the N.C. Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality and sent Marcus back to death row. Marcus and his legal team had to fight until 2020 to finally get his life sentence restored.

Attorney David Weiss remembers going to the prison to tell Marcus the news that he would never be executed: “Marcus said he was excited, grateful, thankful, and elated. He rattled off this string of adjectives. In retrospect, I wonder how happy he really was to be serving a life without parole sentence, whether he was saying that more for our benefit. Life in prison was really hard for Marcus.”

At his funeral, his mother, the Rev. Shirley Burns, sang a beautiful hymn. She had also sung it at the funerals of her two other sons. One of them was murdered in 2006 and police never solved the crime. Friends and family talked about a side of Marcus that never made the headlines. He was one of several talented singers in his family. He was loyal and protective, mischievous and funny.

We’d like to imagine a different life for Marcus, one where he wasn’t born into a racist society that too often sees Black children’s lives as disposable. One where he was shown kindness and compassion as a child, rather than imprisoned.

“Marcus was smart, witty, and sarcastic,” Weiss remembers. “He liked to cross-examine me about his case, or about a current event. He’d ask me hard questions until he felt like he caught me in a contradiction or an awkward moment. Then he’d flash that wide smile and start laughing. Not at all in a mean-spirited way. I think he enjoyed debating and questioning. Maybe in another life he’d have been a lawyer.”

Read Marcus’ obituary he re. Donate to help his family with funeral expenses here.