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Thread: Andrew Darrin Ramseur - North Carolina Death Row

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    Andrew Darrin Ramseur - North Carolina Death Row






    Facts of the Crime:

    Ramseur has already been convicted of murdering Jennifer Vincek and Jeffrey Peck inside a Statesville gas station in 2007. The shooting was captured on security cameras. Ramseur robbed the Statesville convenience store where Vincek worked in 2007. Vincek left behind three daughters, now ages three, five and 10 years old.

    Ramseur was sentenced to death on June 8, 2010.

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    June 7, 2010

    A jury in the sentencing hearing for Andrew Ramseur, convicted last week in a double murder case from 2007, has delivered a double death penalty sentence, WBTV has learned.

    Ramseur has already been convicted of murdering Jennifer Vincek and Jeffrey Peck inside a Statesville gas station in 2007. The shooting was captured on security cameras.

    The jury decided Monday the question as to whether Ramseur would get life in prison or the death penalty. The jury, which deliberated for much of the afternoon Monday, ended up giving him the death penalty for both murders.

    Ramseur robbed the Statesville convenience store where Vincek worked in 2007.

    Vincek left behind three daughters, now ages three, five and 10-years-old. David Wright, Vincek's fiance and the father of her two youngest girls, hopes Ramseur will get the death penalty.

    "He hasn't shown a bit of remorse in my eyes, the only thing he's remorseful of is getting caught," said Wright.

    In the two and half years since Vincek's murder, Wright has remarried. He has a blended family now with his wife, Rebecca, and her two boys.

    "He's cried on my shoulder many, many nights," said Rebecca Wright.

    Rebecca Wright has taken on the roll of mom, but she keeps Vincek's memory alive. She created a shadowbox with Vincek's trinkets which is kept in the girls' room.

    "They're going to know who she is, I'm not going to keep her out of their life," said Rebecca Wright.

    They've adjusted slowly but some days are still harder than others.

    Meanwhile, David Wright says once Ramseur is sentenced, he looks forward to moving on.

    "I can continue to focus on them and just live my life and raise them as she would want, as Jennifer would want," he said.

    http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12604297

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    June 9, 2010

    Judge officially accepts death penalty sentence

    The final phase of a capital murder trial was completed Tuesday morning when the judge formally accepted the death penalty handed down by the jury on Monday afternoon.

    Andrew D. Ramsuer, 21, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of robbery with a dangerous weapon on May 28.

    On Monday afternoon, the jury that heard evidence in the guilt phase decided he deserved the death penalty for killing Broad Street Shell clerk Jennifer Vincek and a customer, Jeffrey Peck, during an armed robbery in December 2007.

    Tuesday morning, the parties in the case gathered for the final time in Iredell County Superior Court.

    Judge Ron Spivey officially accepted the death penalty recommendation by the jury. While it is termed a recommendation, the jury's decision on the penalty is binding.

    As he read the two death sentence recommendations, Spivey ended with the words "God have mercy on his soul for this crime."

    Spivey also handed down the sentence for robbery with a dangerous weapon, adding a total of five to nearly seven years to his sentence.

    The death sentences are automatically appealed and it's likely to take 10 years or more before the execution might be carried out.

    Spivey expressed appreciation to all four attorneys — District Attorney Sarah Kirkman and Assistant District Attorney Mikko Red Arrow and defense attorneys Mark and Vince Rabil — for the way they presented the case.

    During the trial, which began May 10 with jury selection, 17 witnesses testified for the state and five took the stand for the defense in the guilt phase. The state introduced nearly 100 pieces of evidence, with its strongest being the store's surveillance camera footage that captured the crime. The defense introduced 74 pieces of evidence.

    In the penalty phase, three witnesses took the stand for the state and 11 testified for the defense.

    Spivey said the end of the trial is not a joyful event.

    "This is tragic on so many levels," he said.

    Kirkman expressed appreciation to the law enforcement officers involved in this case.

    "I also want to thank Chief Tom Anderson and the Statesville Police Department, not only for their thorough investigation of the case, but also for going above and beyond to help us in the prosecution of the case," she said.

    Kirkman said the jury rendered its decision based on the facts and the law.

    "We respect their decision and thank them for their service. Our hearts go out to the families of Jennifer Vincek and Jeffrey Peck," she said.

    http://www2.statesville.com/content/...alty-sentence/

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    New judge to hear 4 Racial Justice Act murder cases

    A retired judge from the Charlotte area is taking over North Carolina's first four Racial Justice Act death penalty cases - all from Cumberland County - the state Administrative Office of the Courts said.

    And in a separate but related issue, the North Carolina Supreme Court is going to consider whether the rest of the state's roughly 145 Racial Justice Act defendants are entitled to hearings to pursue their claims that racism tainted their trials, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation said on Monday. The court is to decide whether those inmates get to use the act, despite the fact that the state legislature repealed it in 2013.

    The Racial Justice Act was enacted in 2009. Most of the of the state's death row population tried to use it.

    Only four, all defendants in Fayetteville-area homicides, received hearings before the legislature overturned the law.

    Those four persuaded Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks in 2012 that racism influenced the selection of their juries. Weeks commuted their sentences to life in prison without parole.

    The defendants were Marcus Reymond Robinson, who killed a teen in a robbery; Tilmon Golphin, who with his brother killed a deputy and a state trooper in a traffic stop; Christina S. "Queen" Walters, who led a gang that kidnapped and killed two women; and Quintel Augustine, convicted of murdering a Fayetteville police officer.

    The state Supreme Court in December overturned Weeks' decisions and ordered new hearings for the four defendants.

    The court said Weeks should have given the prosecutors more opportunity to prepare their response to the defendants' evidence. The evidence included a detailed statistical study of 20 years of jury selection in capital cases.

    The Supreme Court said Weeks should have separated the cases of Augustine, Walters and Golphin, instead of hearing them as a group.

    "No one has said his findings were wrong, just that procedurally there have been problems," said spokeswoman Gerda Stein of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.

    Her agency has handled much of the Racial Justice Act litigation.

    All four defendants were sent back to death row.

    The Supreme Court ordered Jim Ammons, the senior resident Superior Court judge in Cumberland County, to take over the four cases. But in June, Ammons withdrew after the lawyers for the four death row defendants contended he has biases and conflicts of interest that would prevent him from being fair.

    On Aug. 19, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin assigned retired Superior Court Judge Erwin Spainhour of Cabarrus County, near Charlotte, to take the cases.

    Spainhour, like Weeks before him, is to decide if racism tainted the trials of the four inmates.

    Meanwhile, approximately 140 more death row inmates contend they should get the same opportunity as Robinson, Walters, Golphin and Augustine.

    They argue that once the government grants a right and someone attempts to exercise that right, it's unconstitutional for the government to block the person from using that right, Stein said.

    The question is to be considered by the state Supreme Court for two murder cases from Iredell County, Stein said.

    One of the defendants is Rayford Burke. He is a black man who in 1993 was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury for the shooting death of a police informant, says a summary of the case from Stein's office.

    The other defendant is Andrew Darrin Ramseur, a black man whose jury, too, was all white. He was sentenced to death for killing two white people in a convenience store robbery, Stein's office said.

    The lawyers for the Racial Justice Act defendants say prosecutors for illegal, racist reasons rejected blacks from serving on the juries in these trials.

    http://www.fayobserver.com/news/loca...637fd667b.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Six Death Row prisoners in North Carolina to get new day in court

    By Josh Shaffer
    NewsObserver

    In 2002, Quintel Augustine went on trial accused of murdering a Fayetteville police officer — a notorious case that forced prosecutors to pick a jury in Brunswick County, 90 miles away.

    Augustine was 25 but had already served two terms in prison.

    The officer, Roy Gene Turner Jr., was a five-year veteran of the Fayetteville force, who left behind a fiancee and a 6-month-old child.

    But another distinction has kept the case in dispute ever since: Augustine was black, and the officer, like every member of the jury that handed down the death penalty, was white.

    Court filings argue that Cumberland County prosecutors improperly used race as a primary factor in choosing Augstine’s jurors. In one case, a potential juror was described in handwritten notes as a “black wino,” and then rejected. Notes for a white juror, who was accepted, read “drinks — country boy — OK.”

    Next week, the N.C. Supreme Court will consider whether Augustine and three others on Death Row should should have their sentences reduced to life in prison.

    This reprieve had already been granted to all four of them under the state’s Racial Justice Act, which let prisoners seek relief when they could show racial prejudice in jury selection. But their death sentences were restored when the legislature repealed the law in 2013.

    Two more Death Row defendants will argue that their cases were tainted by the same racial bias the courts have already found with the other four defendants, and they are requesting a hearing to present that evidence.

    Their advocates argue the Supreme Court has the chance to restore a tool created to root out widespread prejudice in the legal system dating back more than a century.

    Death Row debate

    In 2009, when the Racial Justice Act was passed, the minority population in North Carolina had reached 34 percent, according to the nonprofit Center for Death Penalty Litigation. But of the 142 prisoners on Death Row, nearly half were convicted by juries with no minority representation.

    A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Batson v. Kentucky, forbid prosecutors from rejecting jurors on the basis of race alone. But researchers at Michigan State University found in a 2012 study of North Carolina death-penalty trials that black jurors were 2.5 times more likely to be struck.

    Critics of the law called it so broad that it created a loophole for any defendant given capital punishment. When he signed its repeal in 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory said, “Nearly every person on death row, regardless of race, has appealed their death sentence under the Racial Justice Act,” according to the Associated Press.

    But its defenders at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation cite “a mountain” of evidence that already shows decades of bias, and overturning the law serves as a means for ignoring it.

    “Whether you look at it from a legal perspective or a common-sense perspective, it doesn’t make much sense to say we’re going to create this mechanism to see if there’s racial bias, we’re going to find all this evidence and then we’re going to repeal the law,” said David Weiss, attorney with the center.

    Only four people had sentences reduced under the act before its repeal: Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters, Marcus Robinson and Augustine — all of them convicted of murder in Cumberland County. The other two seeking the same chance: Andrew Ramseur and Rayford Burke, both from Iredell County.

    Their attorneys come from the center, the ACLU, the NAACP, the state appellate defender’s office and private practice. N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein’s office will handle the case for the state. A spokeswoman for Stein’s office declined to comment on active litigation.

    Black jurors rejected

    In Ramseur’s case, a black 21-year-old defendant got the death sentence from an all-white jury. All of the qualified black jurors were rejected, his attorney Daniel Shatz wrote in a 2016 brief.

    During his 2010 trial in Statesville, four rows of courtroom seats were cordoned off with crime-scene tape, forcing his family to sit in the back, Shatz wrote. Racially charged comments appeared on a local newspaper website, including “He should be hanging from the nearest traffic light as a warning to the rest.” The court declined to change the trial location or allow a Racial Justice Act review.

    Walters, one of the few women on the state’s Death Row, was sentenced to death in 2000 for her part in a series of gang-related murders in Fayetteville. During her trial, prosecutors rejected 10 out of 14 qualified black jurors and four of 27 whites, wrote center attorney Shelagh Kenney in her brief.

    One black woman was struck, Kenney wrote, because her brother had been convicted on an unrelated gun charge. The woman told prosecutors that she and her brother were not close and his criminal record would not affect her jury service. At the same time, a non-black juror was chosen despite having a brother jailed on a murder charge and writing him regular letters.

    In Robinson’s case, the prosecutor asked a potential black juror if he had graduated from high school or had trouble reading — questions not asked of any others, wrote ACLU attorney Cassandra Stubbs in a 2018 brief. Half the black jurors were rejected compared to 14 percent from other groups.

    Robinson was the first to be granted relief under the act.

    “Never before has any legislature enacted a statute designed to remedy suspected systemic racial bias in capital sentencing,” Stubbs wrote, “only to repeal such a statute when the racial bias was found.”

    Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/lo...#storylink=cpy
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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