N.C. Supreme Court to take up death row appeals
Of the four inmates, three of them are black men and the other, a Lumbee Indian woman.
Two of the men are convicted cop killers. The third shot to death a teenage boy who gave him a ride. The woman led the execution-style murders of two innocent victims.
All four were sentenced to die by Cumberland County juries. And all of them have had their death sentences commuted to life in prison without parole under the since-repealed N.C. Racial Justice Act.
Monday, the state Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether a Cumberland County judge made the right decision when he ruled that their cases were tainted by racism and removed them from death row.
The murderers are Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters, and Tilmon Golphin. These defendants were the first - and so far only - death row inmates in North Carolina to present evidence to a judge under the Racial Justice Act.
A decision in the case could take months. But the justices' questions Monday may telegraph their leanings.
The four convicted killers convinced Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks in 2012 that there was racial bias in the selection of their juries. As permitted by the Racial Justice Act of 2009, Weeks commuted their sentences, much to the dismay of the victims' relatives, law enforcement and others.
In the wake of the decisions, the state Legislature repealed the act as part of a bill intended to push the state to resume executions. No death sentences have been carried out in North Carolina since 2006, chiefly because of an unofficial moratorium in place while officials debated the procedures used to kill the condemned.
Institutional racism
Supporters of the Racial Justice Act said Weeks' decisions were a remedy for the state's history of institutional racism. Statistical evidence presented at hearings in the cases suggested that prosecutors improperly blocked African-Americans from serving on the juries in the four cases.
The killers' lawyers said they did this on the premise black jurors are less likely than white jurors to convict and issue death sentences than black jurors.
For example, in Robinson's trial in the robbery-murder of teenager Erik Tornblom in 1994, the prosecutor refused to sit five of 10 black potential jurors but turned down only four out of 28 whites, a study found.
This study found that in Cumberland County from 1990 to 2010, prosecutors in 11 capital trials used peremptory strikes to keep blacks off juries just over half the time, but whites just about 20 percent of the time. Peremptory strikes, which can be used by both prosecutors and defense lawyers, allow the dismissal of a juror without an announced reason.
It is illegal under a under a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Batson vs. Kentucky, to consider race when deciding whether to seat a potential juror.
Defense lawyers at the Racial Justice Act hearings alleged that prosecutors continued to use race in their decision-making despite the Batson ruling but masked their intentions from judges and opposing counsel.
The defendants' lawyers produced documentation from a training program for prosecutors. They said prosecutors were taught things to say when they wanted to remove a potential juror from a trial and avoid being accused of doing so illegally because of the juror's race.
Legal arguments
Cumberland County Assistant District Attorney Rob Thompson will argue the Robinson case. He says in court papers that Weeks made numerous mistakes.
Statistics alone should not have been sufficient to make a case of racism, Thompson said, and Robinson should have been required to prove intentional discrimination.
If Weeks' ruling is allowed to stand, prosecutors will never be able to rebuff a Racial Justice Act allegation, Thompson said. "The results will be an unrealistic and unachievable standard of constitutionally sound jury selection in capital cases going forward. This the Legislature did not intend with the passage of the RJA," he wrote.
Thompson also challenged the reliability of the study that produced the statistics indicating there was racial bias in jury selection. The study looked at peremptory challenges in 166 death penalty cases statewide, including the 11 in Cumberland County.
A state deputy attorney general made similar arguments in regard to the decision on the sentences of Walters, Golphin and Augustine. Robinson's case was heard in one hearing; the other three were combined in a second hearing - all before Judge Weeks.
Lawyer Mark Rabil, director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at the Wake Forest School of Law, thinks that the prosecutors will have a difficult time at the Supreme Court knocking both Robinson's ruling and the Golphin, Walters and Augustine ruling.
"Basically, the summary is, in the first case, they don't like being bound by statistical studies of what other DAs have done around the state," Rabil said. "They just don't like it. They don't think it's fair."
But, Rabil said, the statute as passed permitted the use of statistical evidence, and Weeks applied the law as written.
Rabil has been observing the issue but is not involved in the cases.
The Golphin, Walters and Augustine cases provoked outrage, especially in the ranks of law enforcement. Tilmon Golphin took part in the shooting deaths of a sheriff's deputy and a highway patrolman. Augustine was convicted of shooting a police officer.
But Rabil said Weeks' ruling likely will stand, Rabil said, because the judge found evidence of racial discrimination and applied both the 2009 law and a revised, stricter 2012 version of the law to their cases.
Weeks 210-page ruling says a prosecutor kept a "cheat sheet" of legally acceptable excuses for peremptorily striking black jurors to mask bias.
While the prosecutors are questioning the evidence that Weeks cited, Rabil thinks it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would do so.
"They should take the facts as the judge found them, unless there was some gross abuse," he said, such as findings that differ greatly from what is presented in a transcript of the hearings.
"I think the state at this point in all the cases is bound by the factual findings. So when the judge said there's statistical patterns of disparity over a long period of time, then that's what it is."
http://www.fayobserver.com/news/crim...ec28b5eb8.html
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