From Gretchen M. Engel, Executive Director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation:

Today’s verdict in Wake County does not reflect the views of the majority of citizens in North Carolina. All it shows is that, if you try ten death penalty cases in a row and exclude from the jury all the people who oppose the death penalty, you can find a jury that will sentence a person to death despite the death penalty’s documented unfairness.

By law, juries in capital trials include only people who support the death penalty, which polls tell us are now a minority in North Carolina. However, even with juries stacked in favor of the death penalty, only two of the past seventeen capital trials in North Carolina have ended with death sentences. In Wake County the ratio is even lower. This is the only death verdict of the past ten capital trials.

Seaga Gillard committed a serious crime for which he should be punished. But was he the worst of the worst? Wake County jurors have rejected the death penalty in cases of rape and murder, including rape and murder of a child. Wake County jurors have refused to impose the death penalty in other double homicide cases and even in a case in which the defendant was convicted of murdering five people. All today’s verdict shows is what we already knew: That the death penalty is imposed arbitrarily, and disproportionately on black men.

Since taking over as Wake district attorney, Lorrin Freeman has pursued the death penalty more than any other prosecutor in North Carolina, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. That is a poor investment, even in this case. Executions have been on hold since 2006 and most death row prisoners in North Carolina have been awaiting execution for more than 20 years. Gillard will now join them, awaiting an execution that is unlikely to ever be carried out.

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.”