Does racial bias exist in the North Carolina justice system?

In North Carolina, statistics don’t just tell a story; they can let a death row inmate challenge his conviction. A 2009 state statute allows death row inmates to claim that racial bias unduly influenced the outcome of their trials. The Racial Justice Act specifically allows defendants to use statistics to support their claims. There are more than 150 death row inmates seeking relief under the law.

Errol Duke Moses and Carl Stephen Moseley are two death row inmates seeking to have their cases re-examined under the act. They have been arguing that racial imbalance and bias played a role in both their trials and sentencings.

In February, Forsyth County Superior Court Judge William Z. Wood refused to find that the Racial Justice Act violated the North Carolina Constitution. Wood rejected an argument that the law was too sweeping to apply fairly across the state. Unless reversed on appeal, the judge’s ruling clears the way for other appeals under the law to go forward.

One study found that between 1990 and 2009, in more than 1,500 cases, North Carolina defendants of all races were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty if one or more of their alleged victims was white.

The second study found that in North Carolina’s death penalty cases, prosecutors removed prospective black jurors from jury panels at more than twice the rate that they removed prospective jurors who weren’t black. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, a prosecutor may not use peremptory challenges to exclude jurors based on their race.

Other states are also reviewing their death penalty laws. Maryland has suspended the death penalty pending review of lethal injection. In recent years, three states—Illinois, New Jersey and New Mexico—have abolished the death penalty altogether.

“If you are going to have a death penalty, you should get the death penalty because of the nature of the crimes or crime you have committed in light of your background, not based on your race or the victim’s race or both,” says Ronald J. Tabak, co-chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities and special counsel for pro bono and general litigation in the New York City office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

“To the extent that valid studies show patterns of racial disparity that cannot be explained by nonracial factors, that is something that the ABA views as unacceptable.”

Link:
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/north_carolinas_death_row_inmates_let_statistics_back_up_bias_claims/