Kristin Collins, Author at The Center for Death Penalty Litigation

N.C.’s highest court faces key test: Will it finally enforce the law against race discrimination on juries?

October 5, 2021 By Kristin Collins

For Immediate Release: October 4, 2021
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, CDPL Executive Director, 919-682-3983

Raleigh, NC — North Carolina is the only southern state whose appellate courts have never once enforced the law prohibiting race discrimination against jurors of color. But that could be about to change. On Oct. 6, the N.C. Supreme Court will hear arguments in State v. Clegg, a case that offers the opportunity to address the unfair exclusion of Black citizens from jury service.

The case involves Christopher Clegg, who was convicted of armed robbery in 2016, but it’s not the facts of the crime that are at issue. Clegg has already finished serving his sentence. Instead, the case hinges on whether the prosecutor illegally removed a Black woman from the jury because of her race.

“This case is a key test for our Supreme Court,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which works to end jury discrimination. “It’s a constitutional right to serve on a jury and to have a voice in the criminal justice system. Yet, people of color are still being systematically excluded from juries. Given what we know today about the corrosive effects of racism on the criminal justice system, we should be welcoming rather than excluding the voices of jurors of color.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987, in Batson v. Kentucky, that it is illegal to exclude qualified citizens from juries based on race. Yet, studies show that in North Carolina, prosecutors continue to strike qualified Black jurors at more than twice the rate of whites. And the state’s high court has yet to enforce the simple rule laid out in Batson.

“Courts across the South, in states like Mississippi and Alabama, have found discrimination against jurors of color on multiple occasions,” said Jin Hee Lee, the senior deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and a member of CDPL’s board of directors. “There is simply no excuse for North Carolina to remain an outlier in its complete failure to protect jurors of color against discriminatory strikes. It is imperative for the North Carolina Supreme Court to take this opportunity to turn the tide and send a strong message that discrimination will no longer be tolerated.”

In Clegg, the prosecutor moved to strike a qualified Black juror. When the defense objected, saying there was no reason for the strike other than the juror’s race, the prosecutor had a chance to give “race-neutral” reasons for his strike. The prosecutor said he did not like the juror’s “body language” and that she said she “supposed” she could be fair, indicating that she was unsure.

The trial judge accepted the prosecutor’s reasons and allowed the prosecutor to dismiss the woman from the jury. However, neither of the prosecutor’s reasons held up to scrutiny. There was no support for the vague claim about the juror’s body language or failure to make eye contact, which is a frequent excuse that prosecutors make for their strikes of Black jurors.

The prosecutor was simply incorrect about the juror being unsure about her own fairness. In truth, she said she “supposed” she could set aside her other responsibilities and serve on the jury. Meanwhile, a white juror who was questioned at the same time as the Black juror said that he would be distracted by his busy job, yet the prosecutor accepted him.

“Often, it seems like our courts are waiting for prosecutors to make openly racist statements in court before enforcing the law,” Engel said. “But this kind of discrimination operates much more subtly. If the courts accept flimsy excuses for excluding Black jurors, they’re allowing discrimination. In this case, the prosecutor didn’t provide a single valid reason for his strike. That’s unacceptable.”

Oral arguments will be held in the N.C. Supreme Court at 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, October 6. Watch here.

Steve Freedman wins CDPL’s 2021 Osborn Award

July 20, 2021 By Kristin Collins

Steve Freedman

CDPL is happy to announce that Steve Freedman is the winner of the 2021 J. Kirk Osborn Award for outstanding leadership in capital defense. Because of the steep rise in Covid cases, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the ceremony honoring Steve until the spring in hopes that we can gather in person. Stay tuned for a new date. Everyone who has purchased tickets and kindly donated to CDPL will be automatically signed up for our spring event. If you have not yet made a gift in Steve’s honor, you may continue to register for the event here. [Please note that the date listed on the registration page is only a placeholder. You will be notified when the new event date is set.]

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 charged with killing four prison guards 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?

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.

New wave of Racial Justice Act litigation begins in North Carolina

May 19, 2021 By Kristin Collins

For Immediate Release: May 19, 2021
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, Executive Director, 919-682-3983

Raleigh, NC — On Thursday, May 20, North Carolina will hold the first hearing under the Racial Justice Act since the state Supreme Court decided in June that people on North Carolina’s death row are entitled to present evidence of racism in their trials despite the legislature’s repeal of the RJA.

Hassan Bacote, one of 137 death row prisoners in North Carolina, will have a hearing in Wake County Superior Court at 10 a.m. Thursday. His case is from Johnston County. The hearing will center around his requests for the state’s jury selection notes, training records and other documents. The state has also requested information about the statistical analyses Bacote relied on.

In other cases, these records have shown that prosecutors wrote disparaging notes about jurors of color like “blk wino” or “blk, high drug” and that they attended training sessions designed to help them evade laws prohibiting race discrimination in jury selection. At these sessions, prosecutors were taught to give vague excuses for their exclusion of Black jurors, including body language or failure to make eye contact.

Bacote has already submitted evidence that Johnston County prosecutors at his 2010 trial excluded qualified Black jurors at more than three times the rate of white jurors. Statewide, a study found that Black jurors are struck at twice the rate of whites, meaning the discrimination in Bacote’s case was even more pronounced than the state average.

“Hassan Bacote is a Black man who was sentenced to death for a crime he committed as a teenager in a county known for Ku Klux Klan activity,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “We already know that the state made a great effort to keep Black people off his jury. We look forward to digging even deeper into the evidence to see how racism affected this case.”

Bacote’s case could set a precedent for how Racial Justice Act cases are handled going forward. The 2009 law allowed death-sentenced people to present evidence of race discrimination and, if they proved that race affected their sentences, be resentenced to life without parole. However, the RJA was repealed in 2013 after the first four death row prisoners won their cases. In the years since, all claims were on hold while the courts determined whether they were still valid after the repeal.

In June, the N.C. Supreme Court forcefully affirmed that all existing Racial Justice Act claims should be heard in court. Justice Anita Earls wrote that racial discrimination in criminal cases “undermines the integrity of our judicial system and extends to society as a whole.”

“We are thrilled that this litigation is beginning to move forward,” Engel said. “It’s critical that our courts examine the striking evidence of discrimination in death penalty trials, and that no one is executed based on a judgment tainted by racism.”

The hearing will be held at 10:00 am at the Wake County Courthouse, Courtroom 704, the Honorable Wayland J. Sermons Jr. presiding.

In 2020, the North Carolina death penalty’s racist origins came into sharp focus

December 16, 2020 By Kristin Collins

For Immediate Release: December 15, 2020
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, CDPL – gretchen@cdpl.org 919-682-3983

Durham — As 2020 ends, the North Carolina death penalty occupies a precarious position in a state coming to terms with systemic racism and sweeping injustice in its criminal punishment system.

There were no new death sentences in 2020, which marks three of the past four years with no death verdicts. Even as federal executions resumed at a stunning pace, North Carolina passed its fourteenth year without an execution. Meanwhile, dozens of the state’s 138 death row prisoners are poised to bring forward claims of racism in their trials and sentences under the Racial Justice Act.

Also, on Monday, Governor Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice released a report acknowledging that the death penalty has a close “relationship to white supremacy” and lynching. The task force recommended a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that would, among other things, study racial disparities in death sentencing, review commutations of death sentences imposed before 2001, and consider replacing the death penalty with a maximum sentence of life without parole. The task force also recommended that the death penalty be prohibited for people with serious mental illness and those under 21, and said juvenile offenses should no longer be used as aggravating factors in death penalty trials.

“Any honest attempt at truth and reconciliation must begin with the acknowledgment that the modern death penalty is rooted in racism,” said CDPL Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel. “North Carolina’s death penalty was used first as a tool for enforcing slavery and then to police segregation. It’s no wonder that today we have a death penalty riddled with inequity. From the disproportionate numbers of people of color on death row to the death sentencing of innocent Black men, from the exclusion of African-American jurors to the favoring of white victims. If we want to move forward as a society, we must reckon with that.”

In October, CDPL released Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty, a sweeping project that puts the modern death penalty in the context of its history. Dozens of scholars, artists, advocates, and people directly affected by the death penalty contributed to the project, which reveals how racism has shaped and perpetuated the modern death penalty.

Also this year, the N.C. Supreme Court recognized in a series of rulings that race discrimination is a serious and ongoing problem in death row cases.

The court ruled in June that all death-sentenced people who had filed claims under the N.C. Racial Justice Act are entitled to hearings where they can present evidence that prosecutors excluded African-American citizens from their juries and that racism tainted their trials. In two subsequent decisions, the court ruled that four people who had already proven discrimination under the Racial Justice Act had to be removed from death row and resentenced to life without parole, ensuring that death sentences infected by racism will never be carried out. One of those decisions noted North Carolina’s “egregious legacy of the racially discriminatory application” of the death penalty.

“This year, our state’s highest court said very clearly that it’s time to stop ignoring racism in the death penalty,” Engel said. “It’s time to confront the clear and undeniable evidence that race still determines who is sentenced to death.”

Engel continued, “Ending the death penalty is just one small part of what’s needed to finally begin erasing the stain of racism from our criminal punishment system, but it’s an important first step. As long as the state is still trying to execute people in our names, we cannot say we are serious about rooting out the legacy of slavery and racial terror.”

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

New project finds a modern death penalty deeply entangled with N.C.’s history of racism

October 5, 2020 By Kristin Collins

For More Information Contact:
Gretchen Engel, CDPL Executive Director – gretchen@cdpl.org 919-682-3983
Henderson Hill, ACLU Capital Punishment Project Senior Counsel – HHill@aclu.org 704-502-1145

Durham, NC — On Monday, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, in collaboration with scholars, advocates, artists, historians, poets, and people directly affected by the death penalty, launched a new online project, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty.

“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,” said CDPL Executive Director Gretchen Engel. “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.”

Engel continued, “In light of all that this project reveals, we call on the North Carolina Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice to undertake serious study of the North Carolina death penalty and recommend its repeal.”

“It’s stunning to read these case studies. Proof positive that the modern death penalty continues the shameful legacy of racialized violence by the state,” said Henderson Hill, Senior Counsel at the ACLU Capital Punishment Project and member of the N.C. Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. “We see Black and Latino men quickly condemned by all-white juries organized by prosecutors too often willing to use racist tropes to recall the jury’s traditional duty to protect the white citizenry. In several cases, jurors openly admitted their bigotry and their desire for the lynchings of Black men.”

Hill wrote the introduction to the project, in which he says: “As we begin a long-overdue conversation about the future of police and prisons, we must confront the punishment that sits at the top of that system, condoning all its other cruelties — the death penalty.”

The project also includes an original poem by nationally-lauded poet and writer Clint Smith and artwork by Durham artist Kimberley Pierce Cartwright. Other contributors include:

Author and historian Tim Tyson writes: “White skin has always been a badge of authority to destroy Black bodies. In North Carolina, white people have exerted that authority not just through police brutality, but through mob violence, lynching, and the death penalty.”

UNC historian Seth Kotch, whose book Lethal State details the history of the N.C. death penalty, says the death penalty and lynching were not opposing forces, but two ways of achieving the same aim. “The reality of history is that both answered the same demands and reacted to the same fears.”

African American death row prisoner Paul Brown writes about the experience of being sentenced to death by an all-white jury. “I saw [the prosecutor’s] shoulders relax as each prospective juror of color left the courtroom.”

Emancipate NC Executive Director Dawn Blagrove writes that Black women have always been the heart of movements for racial justice, including the fight to end the death penalty. “Harriet Tubman led us to freedom. Ida B. Wells exposed the barbarism of lynching. Fannie Lou Hamer led us to political power. Not because of esoteric principle or moral dilemma, but out of necessity.”

Andre Smith, whose son was murdered in Raleigh, says the death penalty is another way that society throws away Black lives. He calls for compassion and mentoring for those who have committed crimes. “This is how we change the world. Not by taking someone’s life.”

Miriam Krinsky and Liz Komar, two former prosecutors, now in leadership roles at Fair and Just Prosecution, write that their pursuit of a more racially just criminal system must leave the death penalty behind. “We both became prosecutors out of a deep desire to do justice and make our communities safer — and we’ve concluded that the death penalty is incompatible with both.”

Sherrilyn Ifill and Jin Hee Lee, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the nation’s premier civil rights law firms, speak to the ways in which North Carolina could become a national leader in addressing racism in its courts. Based on recent N.C. Supreme Court decisions on the Racial Justice Act, they say, “this southern state might serve as an example for the rest of the nation to follow.”

Racist Roots is the result of more than a year of research, writing, and collaboration. It relies on scholarly writings, as well as historical documents and newspaper accounts, and CDPL’s deep knowledge of North Carolina death penalty cases.

“When we started this project, we knew that the death penalty was racist. We’ve seen how it produces disparate outcomes, how it’s used to threaten vulnerable people into confessing to crimes, how it’s carried out in courtrooms where every person wielding power is white,” Engel said.

“But we didn’t realize until we undertook deep research just how closely tied the modern death penalty is to our state’s history of violent white supremacy. The death penalty is a tool of the lynch mob and, no matter how much tinkering we do, it cannot be fixed. The only solution is to end it.”