The Center for Death Penalty Litigation

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

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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?”

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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?”

 

“I watched him die 15 years ago, and I still talk to him sometimes”

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CDPL’s Executive Director Gretchen Engel writes about her continuing grief for her client, Quentin Jones, who was executed 15 years ago today. “I watched him die 15 years ago, and I still talk to him sometimes. I talked to him a lot in the weeks after he was killed and thought maybe I was going a little crazy. And then I thought, it’s probably normal to go a little crazy when you see somebody killed 10 feet in front of you, somebody you knew really well and cared about and tried so hard to save. I’m talking about my client, Quentin Jones, who was executed at 2 a.m. on August 22, 2003. Quentin was 18, homeless, and addicted to drugs in 1987, when he robbed a convenience store with an Uzi 9mm pistol.”

Read the full essay here.

An execution’s aftermath: “I watched him die 15 years ago, and I still talk to him sometimes”

 

 

Jon Megerian and Frank Wells win CDPL’s 2018 Osborn Award

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Frank Wells

During more than 20 years as law partners in Asheboro, Jon Megerian and Frank Wells have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to excellence in capital defense. Their tenacity in and out of the courtroom prompted the Center for Death Penalty Litigation to make them joint recipients of this year’s J. Kirk Osborn Award. They exemplify the leadership, determination, and compassion that are Kirk’s legacy.

Jon and Frank have distinguished themselves by winning life-saving verdicts in some of the most difficult capital cases. In 2011, their client Robert Stewart faced the death penalty for a shooting rampage in a Carthage nursing home that left seven elderly patients and a nurse dead. Stewart was convicted of second-degree murder after Megerian and Wells proved to the jury that Stewart had overdosed on medications and did not even remember his actions on the day of the shooting. And at the 2006 capital trial of Keith Hall, who was accused of murdering four people in a Gaston County trailer park, Megerian and Wells frontloaded powerful mental health evidence. As a result, although Hall was convicted, jurors deadlocked at sentencing after the confounded DA contended that they should not recognize the defendant’s intellectual disability, and should rather attribute his problems to his paranoid schizophrenia. And in 2004, just 15 hours before his scheduled execution, Charles Walker received a stay. Walter ultimately won a new trial and was released from prison.

Jon Megerian

Jon and Frank have also offered invaluable help to other defense attorneys, and have always been willing to guide and empower fellow lawyers. They have served as teachers at CDPL’s Capital College and facilitated many trainings on the Wymore jury selection method, allowing other lawyers to select juries that will save their clients’ lives. With their own work, they have raised expectations for attorney performance; in their roles as teachers and mentors, they help elevate their peers to meet those standards.

Frank is a member of the NC Advocates for Justice, National Legal Aid and Defenders Association, and the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers, as well as a past president of the Randolph County Bar Association. He is also a member of CDPL’s board of directors. Jon is a former member of the Board of Governors for the NC Academy of Trial Lawyers, and a past Bar Councilor for the NC State Bar.

“Their brains, passion, skill, creativity, generosity, tenacity, resilience, compassion, and quick humor – gentle and reflective on Frank’s part, ferocious and sarcastic on Jon’s – make them ideal recipients of the high honor that accompanies this award,” said Janet Moore, former N.C. assistant appellate defender and now a professor of law at the University of Cincinnati. “They literally ‘raise the bar’ by providing a model towards which others can aspire.”

N.C. high court to decide landmark civil rights case on death penalty discrimination

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For Immediate Release: March 2, 2018
For More Information Contact: ACLU Capital Punishment Project E.D. Cassandra Stubbs, 919-449-4885

Raleigh, NC – Today, the N.C. Supreme Court agreed to hear cases that will decide whether four defendants of color should remain on death row despite documented evidence of racial bias in their cases. The court accepted the cases of Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters – who were the first people to prove under the N.C. Racial Justice Act that racial discrimination helped secure their death sentences.

The justices will now receive briefs and hear oral arguments from both sides.  Lawyers for the four said the Supreme Court’s decision to grant review is an important step in a landmark civil rights case.

“I’ve had the honor of being involved in a number of civil rights milestones in North Carolina,” said attorney James Ferguson, a founding member, along with the late Julius Chambers, of the prominent law firm Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter. “In the 1960s, I was part of our state’s first racially-integrated law firm. We challenged school segregation and housing and employment discrimination, winning several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. I was there in 2013 when the governor pardoned the Wilmington 10, a group of civil rights activists who were wrongly convicted in the 1970s by a racially biased prosecution. These Racial Justice Act cases are every bit as important to our state’s progress on civil rights issues.”

In 2012, after listening to weeks of testimony and sorting through documents that spanned decades, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks found “a wealth of evidence showing the persistent, pervasive, and distorting role of race in jury selection throughout North Carolina.” Weeks said the defendants proved that prosecutors removed African Americans from jury service at double the rate they struck other potential jurors. The defendants also exposed bias in prosecutors’ own notes, training materials and testimony. For example, a Cumberland County prosecutor wrote notes such as “blk wino,” “thug,” and “black, high drug” to describe prospective jurors in a capital case.

Under the Racial Justice Act, Weeks removed all four prisoners from death row and sentenced them to life without parole. However, in 2015, the N.C. Supreme Court overturned Weeks’ decision, saying the hearings should be done over because the state wasn’t given enough time to prepare and that three of the defendants, who were tried together, should have their own separate hearings. The defendants were sent back to death row.

Then, in January 2017, Superior Court Judge Erwin Spainhour threw out all four cases without allowing a second hearing, saying the defendants could no longer use the Racial Justice Act because the legislature repealed it in 2013.  Now, the Supreme Court will decide whether Judge Spainhour’s decision to dismiss the defendants’ powerful evidence of race discrimination was correct.

These four defendants join two other death row prisoners, Rayford Burke and Andrew Ramseur, who are already on the court’s docket with a related claim. In those cases, the court will decide whether death row prisoners who filed Racial Justice Act claims but have not yet had hearings still have the right to present evidence of racial bias in court.

“All we want is for the courts to look at the facts and make a fair decision,” said Ferguson. “When you really look at the evidence, it’s clear that race is influencing how we use the death penalty in North Carolina. This is a chance for the state’s highest court to declare, definitively, that racial bias in the death penalty is an urgent civil rights issue that cannot be swept under the rug.”

Listen: CDPL’s Gretchen Engel on the state of the N.C. death penalty

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Gretchen Engel

CDPL’s Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel was interviewed recently by the radio program A Better World, which gives an in-depth look into people and organizations “working to create a world that works for everyone.” In this wide-ranging interview, you can learn about CDPL’s work to advance the cases of death-sentenced men and women and end the death penalty.

Click here to listen to the full story.

 

 

Wake jury opts for life without parole, rejects death penalty in 9th trial in a row

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For Immediate Release: January 24, 2018
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-956-9545

Durham, NC — Another Wake County jury rejected the death penalty Wednesday, choosing two sentences of life without parole for Donovan Richardson at the end of a more than six-week trial. Richardson was the ninth person in a row to be tried capitally in Wake County and be sentenced to life imprisonment.

Wake has not sent anyone to death row since 2007. Yet, it has more frequent capital trials than any county in North Carolina. Wake is the only county in the state where a defendant has been tried capitally every year for the past three years.  During the same period, since the beginning of 2016, there have been only 10 capital trials – and a single death sentence – in all 100 N.C. counties.

“Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and hope they can find peace,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “The reality is, it just doesn’t make sense to pursue the death penalty in Wake County. Juries have made it crystal clear that they no longer want to impose death sentences, and these costly protracted trials benefit no one.”

Nationally, support for the death penalty fell to its lowest point in 45 years in 2017. Yet, even when juries reject the death penalty, it continues to be expensive. The defense cost for a death penalty case is four and a half times that of a non-capital first-degree murder case, according to Indigent Defense Services, the state agency that oversees capital defense North Carolina. That figure does not include cost incurred by local district attorney offices or the courts during lengthy capital prosecutions, which often last months compared with a week or two for non-capital trials.

Richardson’s case stretched over three months, including three weeks of jury selection, more than two weeks of evidence, and three days for the penalty phase in which the jury decides whether to recommend life or death.

Richardson was one of three people involved in the 2014 murders of Arthur Brown and David McKoy in a robbery gone wrong.  His two co-defendants both agreed to plea bargains and neither faced the death penalty. One, who admitted driving the getaway car, will serve less than two years in prison. The other, who the state conceded in Richardson’s trial killed at least one of the victims, was sentenced to life without parole. The Wake District Attorney’s Office also offered Richardson a plea of life without parole, but he declined it. The evidence was unclear as to whether Richardson or a co-defendant killed the second victim.

“Donovan Richardson wasn’t the most culpable murderer in Wake County, or even in this case. He was just the one who refused to accept the plea bargain. That’s why he ended up facing the death penalty,” Engel said. “It’s a system that makes no sense. It’s entirely arbitrary and goes against our ideas about justice and a death penalty reserved only for a carefully selected few.”

 

In 2017, no new death sentences and a frail and aging N.C. death row

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For Immediate Release: December 14, 2017
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-682-3983

Durham, NC — North Carolina juries rejected the death penalty in 2017, refusing to impose death sentences at any of the four trials where prosecutors sought them and making this year the third since 2012 with no new death sentences.

Juries in Wake, Granville and Guilford counties all chose life without parole instead of death this year. At a fourth capital trial in Robeson County, the jury said the defendant was guilty only of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to a term of years.

Only a single person has been sent to N.C. death row in the past three and a half years, and most of the state’s district attorneys are no longer seeking the death penalty. North Carolina has not executed an inmate since 2006 because of ongoing litigation over the state’s lethal injection procedures and racial bias in capital trials.

“There are some elected officials in North Carolina who still like to talk about the death penalty for political purposes, but that’s about the only way it’s being used anymore,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. “The reality is most citizens of North Carolina no longer have any use for the death penalty, not after seeing an innocent man like Henry McCollum spend 30 years there.”

McCollum was released in 2014, after DNA testing proved he was innocent of the 1983 crime for which he was sentenced to death. Nationally, four more death row inmates were exonerated in 2017, bringing the total to 160. A Gallup poll released in October found that Americans’ support for the death penalty had reached its lowest point in 45 years. [See also: The national Death Penalty Information Center released its year-end report Thursday.]

Also in 2017, more questions of innocence arose in North Carolina. Michael Patrick Ryan, who was sentenced to death in 2010 in Gaston County, is awaiting a new trial after a judge ruled in February that misleading DNA evidence was used against him and prosecution investigators intimidated Ryan’s alibi witnesses. Scant credible evidence remains against Ryan, who has always claimed his innocence.

Phillip Davis from Buncombe County was also removed from death row in February and resentenced to life without parole after the court found that race played an improper role in selecting the all-white jury that sentenced him to death. Davis, who was just a few months past his 18th birthday at the time of the crime, spent 20 years on death row before being resentenced.

North Carolina’s death row also shrunk this year because five inmates died of natural causes. Today, 140 men and three women remain on death row. Almost half, 69 of them, are 50 or older. More than three-quarters of death row inmates were sentenced at least 15 years ago, in an era when North Carolina juries sentenced to death dozens of people a year under less enlightened laws.

At the time, the law forced prosecutors to go after the death penalty in almost every first-degree murder case, even when they believed the circumstances called for mercy or there were questions of innocence. Defendants on trial for their lives did not have basic protections such as qualified attorneys or laws requiring that confessions be recorded.

“If we were to restart executions, we would be putting to death people who were tried decades ago without basic legal protections,” Engel said. “Executions would do nothing to solve the problems of today. We would be better served to choose life imprisonment instead and divert the millions of dollars we spend on the death penalty to law enforcement and corrections officers, who unlike the death penalty, make our society safer.”

A life condemned: Remembering my client who died on death row

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CDPL staff attorney Elizabeth Hambourger writes a moving essay about her client, Terry Ball, who recently died of natural causes after 24 years on death row. “Terry Ball caused a lot of pain in his life, and he also experienced more than his share. The same is certainly true of most of the thousands of men and women still on our nation’s death rows. This is who we sentence to death: the most damaged, the most abused; traumatized children who grow into adults without learning how to cope with their fear and anger. The death penalty says these lives have no value. I disagree.”

Read the full essay here.

A life condemned: Remembering my client who died on death row

CDPL celebrates Osborn & Amsterdam award winners

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On Sept. 28, CDPL honored two of our community’s most outstanding capital defense attorneys: Elaine Gordon, the winner of this year’s Osborn Award, and Ken Rose, winner of the Amsterdam Award. [Go here to read more about their exceptional careers.] Our community shared a beautiful evening at Parizade in Durham. It was an event that reminded us of the urgency of our work and the incredible commitment of our colleagues.

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The Center for Death Penalty Litigation
123 West Main Street · Suite 700 · · ·
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919-956-9545
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