Check Out Our Project on the Origins of N.C.'s Death Penalty: Racist Roots

The Center for Death Penalty Litigation

The Racist Roots film is now available for all. Please watch, share & help make the death penalty history!

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CDPL’s powerful new 25-minute film traces the NC death penalty’s deep entanglement with slavery, lynching and racism — and inspires people to join the movement to transform our state’s criminal legal system. CDPL and the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty have been hosting private facilitated viewings of Racist Roots since the spring, but the film is now available for all to see. It includes the stories and voices of advocates, artists, exonerees, and people on North Carolina’s death row. It is a key tool as we strive to educate the public about the injustices of the death penalty and end this cruel punishment. Please help us share it!

Discussion Guide

This film covers hundreds of years of history, some of it deeply disturbing. Whether you watch the film alone or in a group, we suggest that you take a few minutes to breathe and absorb the information. A few suggested questions for reflection:

  • Before you watch the film, spend a few moments reflecting on what you already know, feel and believe about the death penalty. After you’ve watched, what in the film confirmed what you already thought and why? Were there stories in the film that challenged your beliefs?
  • How does your own racial identity and life experience influence how you see this film?
  • Which of the stories in the film surprised you or made you feel something? Why?
  • Why does what happened decades or even centuries ago matter to the modern death penalty?  And why is ending the death penalty a key part of reforming our state’s criminal legal system?
  • Now that you have this information, what do you plan to do? Who will you share it with? What actions will you take? (Some possible answers are below.)

Help spread the message of Racist Roots

Request a facilitated screening and discussion of the Racist Roots film, either for yourself or for your organization or community group.

Download a Racist Roots fact sheet to print or share.

Explore RacistRoots.org, CDPL’s 2020 project on which the film is based. The website includes essays, photos, videos & original artwork by nearly two dozen contributors.

Get plugged in to the grassroots movement led by the NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. CDPL is a member of this powerful organization that is committed to ending the racist death penalty.

Donate to CDPL to help us continue to spread the message of Racist Roots and represent people facing execution.

Learn more about the death penalty nationwide. If you live outside North Carolina, please get involved with local organizations fighting for racial justice, abolition of the death penalty, and a reimagined justice system. If you need help identifying a local group, contact us:

Racist Roots: The Film

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After we released the Racist Roots website in the fall of 2020, we knew that wasn’t the end. We wanted our ambitious project exposing the death penalty’s deep entanglement with slavery, lynching, and white supremacy to thrive and grow. We wanted as many people as possible to understand the racist roots of North Carolina’s death penalty — and to join us in the movement to end it. That’s why, with the help of a talented video production team, we created the film version of Racist Roots. It’s a visually stunning 25-minute film that traces the history of the death penalty from its very beginnings and concludes with a strong call to action for today.

We plan to eventually release the full film publicly, but for now, it is only available for viewing at facilitated screenings. Visit the Racist Roots Film webpage to sign up for a screening, get a Racist Roots fact sheet, and more.

UNEQUAL JUSTICE

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How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row

The death penalty is all but extinct in North Carolina. Juries have recommended only a single new death sentence in the past four years. The state hasn’t carried out an execution since 2006. Yet, North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the nation, with more than 140 men and women. It is a relic of another era.

More than 100 of N.C.’s death row prisoners — about three-quarters — were sentenced in the 1990s, under wildly different laws. During those years, North Carolina juries sent dozens of people a year to death row, more than Texas. The state’s courtrooms were dominated by prosecutors like Ken Honeycutt in Stanly County, who celebrated new death sentences by handing out noose lapel pins to his assistant prosecutors.

Beginning in 2001, after investigations and DNA testing began to reveal innocent people on death row, a wave of reforms transformed the landscape. New laws guaranteed capital defendants such basic rights as trained defense attorneys and the right to see all the evidence in their cases. A court mandate requiring prosecutors to seek death for virtually every first-degree murder — the only such requirement in the nation — was ended.

Today, the death penalty is seen as a tool to be used sparingly, instead of a bludgeon to be wielded in virtually every first-degree murder case. Yet, new laws and shifting public opinion have had little impact on prisoners sentenced in another era. The bulk of North Carolina’s death row is now made up of people who were tried 15, 20, even 25 years ago. They are prisoners of a state that has moved on, but has refused to reckon with its past.

Read the full report:

CDPL’s report, Unequal Justice, finds 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.

Public Safety Experts Condemn the Death Penalty

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Public safety officials were once hesitant to speak out against the death penalty. But today — after 150 innocent people have been exonerated in from death rows across the country — many are beginning to voice serious concerns about the death penalty’s mistakes, waste, and unfairness.

In this video from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, Gerald Galloway, a longtime police chief from Southern Pines, N.C., and Jennie Lancaster, a former warden and chief deputy secretary with the N.C. Department of Corrections who helped manage 14 executions, add their voices to the growing chorus of people who doubt the death penalty’s ability to keep us safe.


 

More resources:

Injustice In the Jury Box

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Race still determines who sits on capital juries in North Carolina. Our overwhelmingly white juries are more likely to convict the wrong people and hand down unequal punishments.

Get the Facts:

    • In N.C. capital trials, prosecutors reject qualified black jurors at more than twice the rate of white jurors.
    • About 20 percent of North Carolina’s approximately 150 death row inmates were sentenced by all-white juries.
    • Nearly half of death row inmates were sentenced by juries that included no more than a single person of color.
    • Nine innocent people have been sentenced to death in North Carolina and later exonerated. Eight of them were people of color.

On Trial for Their Lives: The Leslie Lincoln Story

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We often hear the death penalty is needed to punish a small handful of the “worst of the worst” criminals. However, research shows the death penalty in North Carolina is used broadly and indiscriminately, with little regard for the strength of the evidence against defendants — a practice that puts innocent people in danger of being executed. Watch Leslie Lincoln’s story of being wrongly tried for her mother’s murder. Learn more about wrongful capital prosecutions and read Leslie’s full story at OnTrialForTheirLives.org.

Contact Us

The Center for Death Penalty Litigation
123 West Main Street · Suite 700
Durham, NC 27701
919-956-9545
cdpl@cdpl.org

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