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.”