Kristin Collins, Author at The Center for Death Penalty Litigation

New poll shows death penalty supporters now in the minority among N.C. voters

February 6, 2019 By Kristin Collins

Public concerns grow over racial bias and the execution of innocent people

For Immediate Release: February 6, 2019
For More Information Contact: David Weiss, 919-593-7790

North Carolina has long been considered a solidly pro-death penalty state, but a new poll finds that N.C. voters overwhelmingly believe the death penalty is error-prone and racially biased – and a majority believe it should be replaced with alternative punishments.

The poll of 501 voters across the state, conducted last week by Public Policy Polling, comes as a capital trial begins in Wake County. It is the first comprehensive statewide survey of death penalty views in North Carolina.

It reveals that a steep decline in new death sentences – North Carolina juries have sent only a single person to death row since 2014 – is the result of a sea change in public opinion about the death penalty that reaches across political divides. Of those polled, 47 percent voted for Donald Trump and 45 percent for Hillary Clinton.

“I was stunned when I saw these numbers,” said David Weiss, a capital defense attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. “Seventy percent of people believe an innocent person has likely been executed in North Carolina. Almost 60 percent believe that racial bias affects who is sentenced to death in our state. With these kinds of serious concerns about the death penalty, it’s inconceivable that North Carolina could execute anyone or even continue to sentence people to death.”

The poll found that voters have concerns about the death penalty’s fairness on several fronts:

More than 70 percent said defendants should have the right to bring forward evidence of racial discrimination in capital trials and jury selection.
70 percent believe it is likely that an innocent person has been executed in North Carolina.
68 percent said they support the creation of a new law to exempt people with severe mental illness from the death penalty.
61 percent said they believe the courts should reexamine the death sentences of prisoners who were tried before a series of legal reforms were enacted to protect defendants’ rights and ensure fair trials. More than three-quarters of North Carolina’s death row prisoners were sentenced before these reforms.
57 percent said it is likely that racial bias influences who is sentenced to death.

The poll also showed that voters are willing to consider a range of alternatives to the death penalty:

When given a choice between the death penalty and a maximum sentence of life without parole, more than 50 percent of voters said they favor life without parole, while only 44 percent leaned toward keeping the death penalty. The rest were unsure.
When offered a larger range of alternatives, including requirements that offenders work and pay restitution to victims’ families, only 25 percent of those polled favored the death penalty.
58 percent said they would prefer to eliminate the death penalty if the millions of dollars spent on it each year were redirected to investigating and prosecuting unsolved rapes and murders.
59 percent said they would support a decision by Gov. Roy Cooper to investigate unfairness in the death penalty and, if necessary, replace it with life without parole.
57 percent said they would support a decision by their local district attorney to stop seeking the death penalty because of concerns about fairness, wrongful convictions, and cost.

North Carolina has not executed anyone since 2006. In the years since, five people who were sentenced to death in North Carolina have been exonerated, more than two dozen others have been removed from death row after the courts found serious errors in their cases, and a statewide study found that black jurors are systematically removed from capital juries, violating defendants’ right to be judged by a fair cross section of the community. Meanwhile, murder rates have declined.

Also, in fall 2018, a new report revealed that more than three quarters of North Carolina’s 140 death row prisoners were sentenced before a series of reforms that are now considered essential to fair trials. Among other things, the reforms ensured qualified capital defense lawyers, allowed defendants access to all evidence in the prosecution’s files, created protocols to prevent false confessions and mistaken identifications, and protected people with serious intellectual disabilities from execution.

Executions are currently barred in North Carolina by court order in a case that challenges the state’s lethal injection procedures. However, that case is on hold while the courts address other systemic questions of fairness in the state’s capital punishment system. First among those are cases filed under the state’s Racial Justice Act, which uncovered evidence of statewide race discrimination in capital cases. Those cases are currently before the N.C. Supreme Court and are expected to be argued later this year.

“The capital punishment system has so many problems that the public has lost faith in it,” said Weiss, who is among several attorneys spearheading statewide litigation about racial bias and the lethal injection process. “And after 12 years without executions, North Carolinians have seen that we can maintain public safety without the death penalty. When there is this level of mistrust in the system, we can no longer have a death penalty in North Carolina.”

New death sentences in North Carolina reached historic lows in 2018

December 17, 2018 By Kristin Collins

For Immediate Release: December 17, 2018
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-956-9545 or gretchen@cdpl.org

In 2018, for the second year in a row, juries imposed no new death sentences in North Carolina. This marks the third year of the past four without any death sentences, and the first time in the state’s modern history that juries have rejected the death penalty for two consecutive years.

There were just three capital trials in North Carolina this year, one each in Wake, Lee, and Scotland counties. All three juries chose life without parole instead of death sentences.

The state has not executed anyone since 2006.

“The death penalty in North Carolina has become a relic,” said Gretchen Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation and a defense attorney for death row prisoners. “Very few district attorneys seek death anymore and, when they do, juries reject it. The people of our state are speaking very clearly. We no longer need the death penalty to keep North Carolina safe.”

National trends away from the death penalty also continued in 2018. Washington became the 20^th state to abolish capital punishment. A Gallup poll showed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe the death penalty is applied unfairly. Only eight states executed people, and numbers of death sentences and executions remained near all-time lows. At the same time, estimates showed that the U.S. murder rate was on track for its biggest decline in five years, providing more evidence that there is no connection between crime deterrence and the death penalty.

As the tide turns, Wake County remains an outlier in continuing to seek death sentences. It is the only county in North Carolina that has sought the death penalty at trial every year for the past three years. It is also the only county with two capital trials already on the calendar for early 2019. Since the beginning of 2016, there have been 12 capital trials across North Carolina, and a quarter of them were in Wake County. No other county has had more than one, and 90 percent of counties had no capital trials during those years.

Wake continues to seek death sentences even though the county’s juries have rejected the death penalty in favor of life without parole at nine capital trials in a row — and have not imposed a death sentence for more than a decade.

Continuing capital trials come at a high cost. Defense costs alone in death penalty trials, which are paid by taxpayers, average four times more than in non-capital trials. According to N.C. Indigent Defense Services, defense costs in Wake’s past nine capital trials have averaged nearly $350,000 per case. State taxpayers might have saved nearly $2.4 million if the cases had been tried non-capitally. These estimates do not include added costs for prosecutors, judges, and courts involved in in capital trials, which are longer and more complex.

“Our state is throwing away taxpayer money away every time there’s a capital trial,” Engel said. “We spend four times as much to end up with the same result we could have gotten with a non-capital trial, a sentence of life without parole. We should respect what our juries are telling us and stop death penalty prosecutions.”

Even though no one has been sent to death row since 2016, North Carolina continues to house the sixth largest death row in the nation with 140 prisoners. The vast majority were tried in the 1990s, before a series of reforms that transformed the death penalty by, among other things, providing an adequate defense to poor defendants, ensuring that people facing the death penalty could examine all the evidence against them, and setting protocols for police lineups and confessions to prevent suspects from being wrongly convicted. The problems with outdated death sentences were detailed in CDPL’s 2018 report, Unequal Justice: How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row.

Two people were removed from death row this year because of evidence of mental incapacity that was not revealed during their trials. James Morgan is now serving life without parole, and Juan Rodriguez will get a sentencing hearing. One person, Rowland Hedgepeth, died of natural causes.

Also this year, the N.C. Supreme Court agreed to review the cases of four prisoners who presented overwhelming evidence of race discrimination across the state and in their own cases. The court is expected to hold oral arguments in 2019.

CDPL wins justice for a client who spent 19 years on death row

November 14, 2018 By Kristin Collins

On Nov. 9, CDPL client James Morgan was removed from death row after his attorneys argued that Morgan never got the fair trial to which the Constitution entitles him. The jury that sentenced Morgan to death 19 years ago wasn’t told about his his severe and lifelong brain damage from three separate traumatic brain injuries, beginning in childhood. This is exactly the type of evidence that typically persuades juries to choose life instead of death. With the approval of Buncombe District Attorney Todd Williams, Morgan will now serve life without parole. Read more from one of his attorneys, Elizabeth Hambourger.

CDPL honors 2018 Osborn Award winners

October 15, 2018 By Kristin Collins

On October 11, CDPL honored two of our community’s most outstanding capital defense attorneys, law partners Frank Wells and Jon Megerian. [Go here to read more about their exceptional careers.] Despite a hurricane and a power outage, we managed to have a powerful night celebrating their many accomplishments.

Thanks to photographer Les Todd for volunteering his time to document the evening.

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New Report: Three-quarters of N.C. death row prisoners sentenced under obsolete laws

October 9, 2018 By Kristin Collins

For Immediate Release: October 9, 2018
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-682-3983 or gretchen@cdpl.org or Paul Cates, 212-364-5346 or pcates@innocenceproject.org

WATCH THE VIDEO AND READ THE REPORT HERE

Durham, NC — Approximately three-quarters of the men and women on North Carolina’s death row were tried under obsolete laws, before the enactment of a slew of reforms designed to ensure fairness and prevent wrongful convictions, a new report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation has found.

North Carolina is home to the sixth largest death row in the nation with 142 prisoners. According to the report, Unequal Justice: How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row, 73 percent of the state’s death row prisoners were tried before 2001, when the first in a series of significant reforms took effect. Most of those condemned prisoners were sentenced in the 1990s, when starkly different death penalty laws and attitudes drove North Carolina to sentence between 25 and 35 people to death each year — and when harsh sentencing laws were creating a nationwide epidemic of mass incarceration.

The new report comes as North Carolina has just passed its 12^th year without an execution and is on track for another year with no new death sentences. Just one person has received a death sentence in the past four years.

“Today, we are living in a different world from when these men and women were sent to death row,” said Gretchen M. Engel, Executive Director at CDPL, a non-profit law firm that represents death row prisoners in North Carolina. “Public support for the death penalty is at a 50-year-low, and North Carolina has stopped executing people. Juries now see life without parole as a harsh and adequate punishment for the worst crimes. The fact is, if these people on death row had been tried under modern laws, most of them would be serving life without parole sentences instead of facing execution.”

The report’s findings show that out of 142 death row prisoners in North Carolina:

92% (131) were tried before a 2008 package of reforms intended to prevent false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications, which have been leading causes of wrongful convictions across the country. The new laws require interrogations and confessions to be recorded in homicide cases and set strict guidelines for eyewitness line-up procedures.
84% (119) were tried before a law granting defendants the right to see all the evidence in the prosecutor’s file — including information that might help reduce their sentence or prove their innocence.
73% (104) were sentenced before laws barring the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Despite a promise of relief for these less culpable defendants, disabled prisoners remain on death row.
73% (103) were sentenced before the creation of a statewide indigent defense agency that drastically improved the quality of representation for poor people facing the death penalty, and a law ending an unprecedented requirement that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in every aggravated first-degree murder. Before these changes, prosecutors did not have the ability to seek life sentences in these cases and poor people often received a sub-standard defense.

Many of the reforms came in response to a slew of exonerations both in North Carolina and around the country, which exposed an epidemic of innocent people on death row. Nine death sentenced men have now been exonerated in North Carolina. Most recently, North Carolina’s longest-serving death row inmate, Henry McCollum, proved his innocence with DNA evidence in September 2014.

The reforms outlined in the report were designed to prevent innocent people from being sentenced to death. For example, a reform requiring the recording of interrogations and confessions would have prevented Henry McCollum’s coerced confession, written for him by law enforcement, from being used to secure his conviction.

“Despite many important reforms, our capital punishment system still makes mistakes,” said Barry Scheck, Co-Director and Co-founder of the Innocence Project. “But during the years when most of North Carolina’s death row prisoners were sentenced, the system was absolutely stacked against poor people on trial for their lives. We’re talking about people whose defense attorneys came to court drunk, people who never saw evidence that might have proven their innocence, people who were convicted on the basis of a tainted eyewitness identification that would never be admissible in court today. They never had a chance at justice, and some of them might be innocent.”

Listen to the moving story of a capital defense attorney

October 3, 2018 By Kristin Collins

It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be a capital defense attorney. To be responsible for saving the lives of people who’ve committed terrible crimes, and sometimes, to be forced to watch them die. In this video, CDPL attorney Elizabeth Hambourger explains in moving and personal terms what it’s like to do this most difficult of jobs.

She performed this spoken word piece at Poetic Justice, an event organized by the Carolina Justice Policy Center, in which poets, advocates, attorneys, and others told stories of the criminal justice system. Take a few minutes to watch, and step into someone else’s world.

The more I know about the death penalty, the more problems I see with it. But what seems most pressing to me now is that the death penalty increases pain. It’s like a machine that takes this terribly painful human event, and it takes that pain and replicates it and sends it spewing out in all directions.

See more videos from Poetic Justice here.

Unequal Justice Report

October 3, 2018 By Kristin Collins

UNEQUAL JUSTICE

October 1, 2018 By Kristin Collins

How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row

The death penalty is all but extinct in North Carolina. Juries have recommended only a single new death sentence in the past four years. The state hasn’t carried out an execution since 2006. Yet, North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the nation, with more than 140 men and women. It is a relic of another era.

More than 100 of N.C.’s death row prisoners — about three-quarters — were sentenced in the 1990s, under wildly different laws. During those years, North Carolina juries sent dozens of people a year to death row, more than Texas. The state’s courtrooms were dominated by prosecutors like Ken Honeycutt in Stanly County, who celebrated new death sentences by handing out noose lapel pins to his assistant prosecutors.

Beginning in 2001, after investigations and DNA testing began to reveal innocent people on death row, a wave of reforms transformed the landscape. New laws guaranteed capital defendants such basic rights as trained defense attorneys and the right to see all the evidence in their cases. A court mandate requiring prosecutors to seek death for virtually every first-degree murder — the only such requirement in the nation — was ended.

Today, the death penalty is seen as a tool to be used sparingly, instead of a bludgeon to be wielded in virtually every first-degree murder case. Yet, new laws and shifting public opinion have had little impact on prisoners sentenced in another era. The bulk of North Carolina’s death row is now made up of people who were tried 15, 20, even 25 years ago. They are prisoners of a state that has moved on, but has refused to reckon with its past.

Read the full report:

CDPL’s report, Unequal Justice, finds that out of 142 death row prisoners in North Carolina:

92% (131) were tried before a 2008 package of reforms intended to prevent false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications, which have been leading causes of wrongful convictions across the country. The new laws require interrogations and confessions to be recorded in homicide cases and set strict guidelines for eyewitness line-up procedures.

84% (119) were tried before a law granting defendants the right to see all the evidence in the prosecutor’s file — including information that might help reduce their sentence or prove their innocence.

73% (104) were sentenced before laws barring the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Despite a promise of relief for these less culpable defendants, disabled prisoners remain on death row.

73% (103) were sentenced before the creation of a statewide indigent defense agency that drastically improved the quality of representation for poor people facing the death penalty, and a law ending an unprecedented requirement that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in every aggravated first-degree murder. Before these changes, prosecutors did not have the ability to seek life sentences in these cases and poor people often received a sub-standard defense.

Two new articles showcase CDPL’s work to end race bias

September 17, 2018 By Kristin Collins

CDPL attorneys have taken on a clear case of racial discrimination during the death penalty trial of our client Russell Tucker. The evidence shows that the prosecutor in Tucker’s case used a “cheat sheet” to get around a law that prohibits prosecutors from striking jurors based on race. Recently, this in depth article was published about the case.

Did Prosecutors Use a ‘Cheat Sheet’ to Strike Black Jurors in a North Carolina Death Penalty Case?

Also this month, former CDPL board member James Coleman, published a new article showing that N.C. appellate courts have been uniquely remiss in failing to protect the rights of people of color to serve on juries and thereby participate in our democracy. This article arose from the work of CDPL staff.

The Persistence of Discrimination in Jury Selection: Lessons from North Carolina and Beyond

If you need a quick explanation of the problem of race discrimination in capital jury selection, watch CDPL’s 3-minute video:

Jurors sent an innocent man to death row; now they ask: “Where did we go wrong?”

September 7, 2018 By Kristin Collins

CDPL employees spent the spring and summer criss-crossing rural North Carolina, interviewing jurors who unanimously voted to send Henry McCollum to death row. Now that McCollum has been exonerated, the jurors struggle with regret and confusion. “Some seemed relieved to finally talk through the trauma of the trial. Many were ashamed of their role, afraid of what their neighbors would think. Some feared God’s wrath, and wondered if they would go to hell for McCollum’s wrongful conviction. Some shed tears at the mention of his name and said the experience was too painful to revisit. They remembered McCollum at the defense table, silent and unresponsive, like a confused and broken child.”

Read more of Kristin Collins’ op-ed from the News & Observer.

Jurors sent an innocent man to death row. Now they ask: “Where did we go wrong?”