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:

• Public Safety Officials on the Death Penalty
• N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty: Executions Fail to Deter Crime
• Former NC Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake: The Death Penalty is Unfair and Unconstitutional
• N.C. Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty
• Police Chiefs: Death Penalty Not an Important Tool

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.

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.