Justices must decide whether evidence of jury discrimination in capital cases will come to light

For Immediate Release: August 19, 2019
For More Information Contact: David Weiss, 919-593-7790 or Jin Hee Lee, 917-202-8848

Raleigh, NC — The N.C. Supreme Court will hear arguments next week, August 26 and 27, in the cases of six death row prisoners who have presented evidence that racial bias tainted their trials and death sentences.

The Racial Justice Act (RJA) was a first-of-its-kind law that allowed for a systematic review of racial discrimination in death penalty trials. Death row prisoners who proved discrimination had to be resentenced to life in prison without parole. The law was enacted in 2009, and its passage led to the uncovering of new evidence of discrimination. In 2013 a newly elected legislature repealed the RJA. That same legislature enacted voting laws that federal courts later determined to be racially motivated.

Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether the six defendants, who filed claims while the law was in effect, have a constitutional right to present their evidence of discrimination in court. The state seeks to dismiss all six defendants’ RJA claims without hearings.

“The court must answer a key question for North Carolina,” said David Weiss, a staff attorney with Durham’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation, one of several law firms that represents the RJA defendants. “Will our state abide by its constitution and confront the evidence that race has played an unacceptable role in death penalty trials? Or will we throw the evidence away without a hearing and send the message that pervasive racial bias doesn’t matter, even in life-and-death trials?”

The court will hear the following cases:

Marcus Robinson, Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters, and Quintel Augustine from Cumberland County are the only four death row prisoners whose RJA cases were heard in court. In 2012, they won and were resentenced to life in prison without parole. On appeal, all four were returned to death row after the N.C. Supreme Court sent their cases back to Superior Court for a redo, saying that each defendant should get a separate hearing and that the state should be given more time to prepare. Yet, when the cases went back to Superior Court, a judge dismissed them without new hearings. The Supreme Court will decide whether Robinson, Golphin, Walters and Augustine have a right to the life sentences they previously won under the RJA, or whether they have a right to new hearings.

Andrew Ramseur and Rayford Burke are death row prisoners from Iredell County who filed RJA claims before the law’s repeal, but never got hearings. After the repeal, judges dismissed their claims, saying they no longer had a right to present evidence because the law was defunct. The Court will decide whether Ramseur and Burke have a constitutional right to litigate their claims.

The six defendants found a cache of evidence of race discrimination:

• A prosecutor referred to Burke as “a big black bull” during closing arguments.
  During jury selection at Golphin’s trial, two white jurors suggested that Golphin should have been lynched, yet were allowed to remain in the jury pool.
• At Ramseur’s trial, the sheriff’s department cordoned off the area behind the defense table with crime scene tape, prejudicing the jury and forcing the defendant’s black family to sit in the back of the courtroom.
• A black juror in Robinson’s case was questioned about whether he had gone “straight through” school, implying he may have repeated grades. The prosecutor also questioned his ability to read. White jurors were not asked these demeaning questions.
• In Augustine’s case, prosecutors wrote insulting notes about black jurors. A black juror with criminal history was a “thug” while a white juror who trafficked in drugs was “a fine guy.” A black juror was a “blk wino” while a white juror with a DUI conviction was a “country boy – ok.” A Black woman was acceptable because she was “from a respectable BLK family.”
• In several cases, prosecutors relied on a “cheat sheet” of prefabricated reasons to justify striking black jurors.
• In all cases, a statistical study showed that prosecutors struck qualified black jurors at far higher rates than white jurors, denying African American citizens the fundamental right to wield power in the jury box and defendants the right to a jury of their peers.

“These defendants uncovered a mountain of evidence that race played a role in their death sentences. Now, the law requires that our state deal with that evidence,” Weiss said. “If the justices don’t allow these defendants a fair hearing, North Carolina will have given up even the pretense of believing in justice for all.”

Racial discrimination in the jury box is a national problem, which was highlighted again in June when the U.S. Supreme Court granted a new trial to Mississippi death row prisoner Curtis Flowers because the prosecutor systematically excluded black jurors over the course of six trials.

“Jury discrimination is one of the key civil rights issues of our time,” said Jin Hee Lee, Senior Deputy Director of Litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which filed a brief in support of the RJA cases. Founded by Thurgood Marshall, LDF becomes involved in cases when they present a chance to advance racial justice. Lee continued, “It threatens the integrity of our justice system and our democracy when we allow black citizens to be illegally barred from jury service. We hope North Carolina will give the evidence in these capital cases the serious consideration it deserves, and take needed steps to end race discrimination in North Carolina’s death penalty.”

Oral arguments begin at 9:30 a.m. Monday and Tuesday, Aug. 26 and 27 in the chambers of the N.C. Supreme Court, 2 East Morgan Street, Raleigh. On Monday, the court will hear the cases of Ramseur, Walters, Robinson, Burke, and Augustine. On Tuesday, it will hear Golphin’s case.

Read more from the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

For the full briefs filed in the cases, click here.

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.

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.”