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

Click to read the report.

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.

For immediate release: March 6, 2017
For More Information Contact: Gerald Galloway, 910-639-0857

Wake jury chooses life without parole instead of death for seventh time in a row

Raleigh, NC – Last Friday, for the eighth time in a row, a Wake County jury rejected the death penalty. At the end of an eight-week trial for his life, Nathan Holden received a sentence of life with no possibility of parole.

It has been nearly a decade since Wake has sent anyone to death row. Now, public safety officials are coming forward to say the death penalty is a waste of resources in the fight against crime. In a new video from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a longtime North Carolina police chief and a high-ranking retired prison official who helped manage more than a dozen executions say they have serious concerns about the death penalty’s errors, ineffectiveness, and high cost.

“We spend so much time and money seeking death sentences in a tiny percentage of cases, and we have to ask ourselves, what are we getting for that investment?” said Gerald Galloway, a retired Southern Pines police chief who is now among the leaders of Public Safety Officials on the Death Penalty, a group of law enforcement and corrections officials from across the U.S. who are concerned about the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty.

“We have a broken system where innocent people are sometimes sentenced to death,” Galloway said. “We promise victims’ families ‘closure,’ and then the convicted sit on death row for decades, if they are executed at all. It only makes sense that juries are rejecting the death penalty. It no longer serves any useful public safety purpose.”

Seeking the death penalty at trial is a costly gamble for prosecutors. When defendants face the death penalty, they are entitled to two attorneys. A separate sentencing phase of the trial is required. And juries in capital cases must be “death qualified,” a process that removes all jurors who oppose the death penalty.

In an urban county like Wake, where people are increasingly skeptical of the death penalty, that process can extend the trial by weeks. In Holden’s case, it took more than five weeks to seat a jury.

According to N.C. Indigent Defense Services, the average capital case costs about four times as much as a non-capital first-degree murder case.

It has been more than a decade since North Carolina executed a prisoner. In the meantime, many who formerly supported the punishment have begun to speak out against it. In May 2016, former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr., who voted to affirm 185 death sentences, said he now believes the death penalty is unconstitutional.

Jennie Lancaster, a former Chief Deputy Secretary at the N.C. Department of Corrections, was part of a team managing 14 executions in North Carolina. She has consulted with N.C. Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, and says she does not believe the death penalty improves public safety. She says executions are hard on prison staff and that even the most violent offenders can be managed within prison walls.

“It is a fallacy to believe that the inmates who are on death row have committed the very worst crimes in some sort of hierarchy,” she says in the new video. “We have hundreds and thousands of inmates who have done the same thing. We manage them every day.”

Learn more at cdpl.org/safety.

For Immediate Release: December 21, 2016
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-956-9545 or Kristin Collins, 919-791-7976

State houses nation’s 6th largest death row, despite no executions and few new death sentences

Durham, NC — In 2016, North Carolina passed the decade mark without an execution, tried just five people capitally in all 100 counties, and of those five, sent only one person to death row. As another year ends, North Carolina continues to reflect national trends, which clearly show the death penalty on the decline.

Across the country, new death sentences in 2016 were at their lowest point in the modern era of the death penalty, which began in 1972. Only 20 people were executed in the U.S. this year, the fewest in 25 years. And a September poll from the Pew Research Center showed that in 2016, for the first time in four decades, a majority of Americans no longer support the death penalty. (More national statistics at DeathPenaltyInfo.org.)

“Look at Wake County, which used to send people to death row almost every year, but hasn’t had a new death sentence in almost a decade. This year, in the sixth case in a row, a Wake County jury chose a sentence of life without parole over the death penalty,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “Society’s beliefs have shifted, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, people no longer think it’s appropriate.”

Over the past five years, an average of fewer than two people per year have been sent to death row in North Carolina, compared with 20 to 30 people per year in the 1990s. There were no new death sentences in 2012 and 2015. Yet, despite the death penalty’s fade, North Carolina continues to cling to one relic of the death penalty’s past.

With 150 men and women awaiting execution, North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the nation. Three-quarters of N.C. death row inmates were convicted and sentenced at least 15 years ago, at a time when laws governing the death penalty were starkly different.

North Carolina now must maintain a death row where people live for decades. Two inmates died of natural causes this year, bringing the total to six in past five years. Almost half of N.C.’s death row inmates are now 50 or older, and 21 are 60 or older.

“Our death row is becoming a costly warehouse for the elderly,” Engel said. “And most of these people, if they had been tried under today’s laws, would never have been sentenced to death in the first place.”

In 2014, the exoneration of Henry McCollum, N.C.’s longest serving death row inmate showed just how unreliable decades-old convictions can be. Both McCollum and his brother, Leon Brown, were sentenced to death in 1983 based on false confessions that were written for them by law enforcement. McCollum and Brown did not benefit from modern laws designed to prevent false confessions, which now require all murder interrogations and confessions to be recorded.

One hundred twelve of North Carolina’s death row inmates were tried during an era when North Carolina was the only state in the nation that forced prosecutors to seek death sentences in every case of first-degree murder with an aggravating factor, regardless of other factors that might have called for mercy. Prosecutors could not agree to a sentence other than death even if, for example, the defendant played a minor role in the crime or was seriously mentally ill. This requirement led to unprecedented numbers of capital prosecutions and gave North Carolina one of the highest death sentencing rates in the nation during the 1990s. As soon as the requirement was dropped in 2001, death sentences plummeted.

The majority of death row inmates did not have the benefit of key reforms including the creation of a state agency to oversee indigent defense; a law granting defendants access to all the evidence in the prosecutor’s file, including evidence pointing to innocence; a bar on the execution of people with intellectual disabilities; and new strict guidelines for suspect lineups designed to prevent mistaken eyewitness identification.

In light of the unfairness in the system, even the staunchest defenders of the death penalty are now beginning to rethink their support for the punishment. As the former Republican Chief Justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, I. Beverly Lake, Jr. voted to affirm 185 death sentences, and 120 of those people remain on death row today. This May, he said he now believes the death penalty is unfair and unconstitutional.

Lake wrote in an op ed: “After spending years trying to instill confidence in the criminal justice system, I’ve come to realize that there are certain adverse economic conditions that have made the system fundamentally unfair for some defendants.”

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