Monday, February 3, 2020                                                 

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Miriam Krinsky, Fair and Just Prosecution, krinskym@krinsky.la, (818) 416 5218
David Weiss, Center for Death Penalty Litigation, dcweiss@cdpl.org, (919) 593-7790

RALEIGH, N.C. – On February 3, at 9:30 a.m., the North Carolina Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases of two criminal defendants, Cory Bennett of Sampson County and Cedric Hobbs of Cumberland County. In both cases the court must decide whether prosecutors illegally excluded black citizens from juries because of their race. If the court decides in the defendants’ favor, it will be the first time in North Carolina’s history that the high court has acknowledged race discrimination against jurors of color. 

“These cases are about far more than these two defendants,” said Duke Law Professor James Coleman, a scholar on race and the law who filed an amicus brief in both cases. “They’re about whether North Carolina’s high court will finally confront the problem of African Americans being systematically denied the right to wield power in our justice system. For too long, this discrimination has been an open secret, ignored at the highest levels of North Carolina’s justice system. Now, our court has the chance to say that race discrimination in the jury box must end.”

Two recent studies found that qualified black citizens in North Carolina are excluded from juries at more than twice the rate of white people, denying defendants the right to be judged by a fair cross section of their community. Research has also found that juries with two or more members of color deliberate longer, discuss a wider range of evidence, and are more accurate in their statements about cases, regardless of the defendant’s race. And as recently as June of last year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion in Flowers v. Mississippi warning that race discrimination in jury selection is a pressing problem that courts must address.

Despite this, a recent analysis revealed that North Carolina’s high courts have failed to enforce the law established in Batson v. Kentucky, a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision that barred racially-motivated jury exclusion. In the thirty years since Batson, more than a hundred North Carolina defendants have raised claims of race discrimination against jurors of color. Yet, the state’s appellate courts have never upheld a single one of those claims.

“Now, the N.C. Supreme Court has a chance to make a clean break from this unfortunate track record, and chart a new path forward,” Coleman said. “There is no question that black citizens are unfairly excluded from jury service because of their race. The only question is whether the North Carolina courts will finally provide meaningful protection from this longstanding civil rights violation.”

North Carolina’s appellate courts stand alone among southern states in failing to acknowledge this type of discrimination. Courts in every southern state, except North Carolina, have enforced the law against jury discrimination and overturned convictions because of racial discrimination against jurors of color. Alabama, for example, has had more than 80 appellate reversals because of racially-tainted jury selection.

The evidence in the cases now before the court mirrors what has been found in studies of broad patterns in North Carolina. In both trials, prosecutors used most or all of their strikes to remove black jurors. When asked to explain their strikes, prosecutors cited characteristics virtually identical to those of white jurors who were accepted. Bennett and Hobbs will get new trials if the court decides in their favor.

If the North Carolina Supreme Court finds race discrimination in these cases, it will join other state courts that have recently confronted the issue, such as Washington, Nevada and Connecticut. All have taken steps to end racial discrimination, including reversing convictions marred by racial bias, crafting new legal approaches, and appointing study commissions on jury discrimination. 

Several national organizations, along with North Carolina civil rights leaders and advocacy groups, have filed “friend of the court” briefs urging the North Carolina Supreme Court to take action. These groups include Fair and Just Prosecution, the North Carolina NAACP, the North Carolina. Advocates for Justice, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, the Anti-Defamation League, Latino Justice and the Korematsu Center for Law and Equality. 

“The exclusion of African Americans from the jury box is a fundamental civil rights problem rooted in our shared history of subjugation and segregation based on race,” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution. “It will take a concerted effort at every level of the justice system to solve this problem. Right now, the North Carolina Supreme Court has a chance to step up to the task, apply the law fairly, and send a message that North Carolina’s tolerance of this injustice must end.”

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 Fair and Just Prosecution is a national network of elected prosecutors working towards common-sense, compassionate criminal justice reforms. To learn more about FJP’s work, visit http://www.fairandjustprosecution.org/ or follow us on Facebook @FairAndJustProsecution.

 Center for Death Penalty Litigation is a non-profit law firm that provides direct representation to inmates on North Carolina’s death row, as well as consulting with and training attorneys who practice capital litigation across the state. In addition to representing individual clients, CDPL spearheads litigation that addresses systemic injustices and educates the public about the death penalty. To learn more about CDPL’s work visit https://www.cdpl.org.

 

Additional background information

 State v. Cory Bennett was tried in 2016 in Sampson County, North Carolina, on charges of possession and trafficking of methamphetamines. Mr. Bennett was convicted and sentenced to a maximum of 13 years in prison. During jury selection, the prosecutor used only two peremptory strikes to remove jurors, both against African-Americans. When the defense lawyer objected that the strikes were racially motivated, the trial judge overruled the objection and did not even require the State to explain its reasons for the strikes. The trial judge instead questioned the defense lawyer about her strikes against, what the judge termed, “white Americans.” The N.C. Court of Appeals found no error, but the N.C. Supreme Court decided to review the case further, even though it was not required to do so.

State v. Cedric Hobbs was tried in 2014 in Cumberland County, North Carolina, on one charge of first-degree murder related to the armed robbery of a pawn shop. Mr. Hobbs was convicted. The State sought the death penalty, but the jury chose a sentence of life imprisonment. During jury selection, the prosecution used eight peremptory strikes to remove jurors, six of whom were black. When the defense lawyer objected, the prosecutor responded defensively that the objection “was somehow [saying] we’re just racists in this county.” The trial judge required the prosecutor to explain the reasons for striking the black jurors, but nonetheless overruled the defense. The N.C. Court of Appeals reviewed the case and found no error, but the N.C. Supreme Court granted discretionary review. The defense argues the State’s strikes were discriminatory because the prosecutor cited “race-neutral” traits that caused them to remove black jurors but accepted white jurors with the very same traits. A statistical study showed the prosecutor’s office in this county has a twenty-year track record of removing black jurors at twice the rate that they remove all other jurors. And the prosecutors in this case questioned black jurors very closely on certain issues but did not closely question white jurors who had the same characteristics. 

Discrimination against jurors of color is a major problem in North Carolina. Studies show that North Carolina’s appellate courts have failed to police jury discrimination. Other studies show the effect of this failure: such discrimination is rampant in North Carolina’s trial courts. These studies are discussed in an article published in NACDL’s legal magazine, The Champion. That article also highlights efforts by several state supreme courts to address the problem. In addition, in December 2019, the Connecticut State Supreme Court announced a new Jury Selection Task Force, because “allow[ing] the systematic removal of minority jurors . . . create[s] a badge of inferiority, cheapening the value of the jury verdict.” It is time for North Carolina to take similar steps to enforce and update its own laws barring race discrimination in jury selection.

The briefs in the two cases, including amicus briefs, can be found here.

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.”

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.”

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

 

For Immediate Release: August 31, 2017
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel 919-956-9545 or Kristin Collins 919-791-7976
 
Raleigh, NC — This Saturday marks three years since the biggest exoneration in North Carolina history. Brothers Henry McCollum, who was North Carolina’s longest serving death row inmate, and Leon Brown were declared innocent in a Robeson County courtroom on Sept. 2, 2014.

On this anniversary, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, whose attorneys represented McCollum for two decades, have released a new report that tells the full story of the men’s wrongful conviction and exoneration. [Read the full report here.]

“Henry and Leon’s story has so many lessons to teach us,” said CDPL’s Executive Director Gretchen Engel. “It shows us the power that law enforcement and prosecutors have in our system, and how that power can be abused. It shows us how hard it is to uncover a wrongful conviction. It shows us that even cases we think are airtight can get the facts entirely wrong. ”

The report begins with McCollum and Brown’s arrest as vulnerable, intellectually disabled teenagers, and chronicles their trials, as well as the lucky break that led to their exoneration more than 30 years later. DNA testing on a cigarette butt left at the crime scene showed that the true culprit was a serial rapist who lived just feet from where 11-year-old Sabrina Buie’s body was found.

On the day of their exoneration, three years ago:

As the judge spoke the words that would set them free, Leon smiled broadly. But Henry dropped his head and closed his eyes, the heartbreak of the past 30 years etched into his sunken cheeks. In the back of the courtroom, Sabrina Buie’s family held each other and wept. Their daughter had been dead more than three decades, and justice was nowhere to be found.

“This case should be a warning to us of how easy it is to convict the wrong person and never figure out the truth,” Engel said. “Henry and Leon were freed because of a single cigarette butt. What if the killer hadn’t dropped it at the scene, or it had been lost during three decades in storage? They would still be in prison, and Henry might have been executed. Now, think about all the other cases on death row where there is no biological evidence.”

Biological evidence is available in the cases of less than a third of the 144 inmates on North Carolina’s death row. Three-quarters of death row inmates were tried more than 15 years ago, before a series of reforms designed to prevent the conviction of the innocent.

Nine months after their exoneration, McCollum and Brown received a rare pardon of innocence from the governor. The brothers have filed a civil lawsuit over their wrongful convictions, which remains pending.