Results 1 to 7 of 7

Thread: Russell William Tucker - North Carolina Death Row

  1. #1
    Guest
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    5,534

    Russell William Tucker - North Carolina Death Row




    Facts of the Crime:

    On 31 July 1995, defendant was indicted for the first-degree murder of Maurice Travone Williams, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury to S.E. Spencer, and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury to H.M. Bryant, all occurring on 8 December 1994. Defendant was tried capitally, and the jury returned a verdict finding him guilty of first-degree murder on the theory of premeditation and deliberation and under the felony murder rule. Following a capital sentencing proceeding pursuant to N.C.G.S. § 15A-2000, the jury recommended that defendant be sentenced to death. The trial court sentenced defendant accordingly. Subsequent to the sentencing on the murder charge, the State dismissed the two assault charges.

  2. #2
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    On November 14, 2007, Tucker filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/nor...cv00868/47197/

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2014
    Location
    FRANCE
    Posts
    3,073
    Motion: Prosecutors used race in jury selection in Winston-Salem murder trial involving killing of Kmart security guard

    By Michael Hewlett
    The Winston-Salem Journal

    A Forsyth County man on death row for killing a Kmart security guard in 1994 alleges prosecutors used a training document to hide the fact that they considered race in striking five potential jurors during his trial.

    Russell William Tucker, 51, was convicted in February 1996 of first-degree murder in the death of Maurice Travone Williams. Tucker was accused of shooting Williams in the chest on Dec. 8, 1994, after Tucker walked out of the Kmart store in clothing Williams believed Tucker had stolen.

    According to testimony, Tucker shot at one security guard and missed. Williams turned and ran, and Tucker shot Williams in the chest, with the bullet piercing Williams’ aorta and both lungs. Tucker fired five times into a police car as he ran away. One officer was wounded.

    On Feb. 21, 1996, Tucker was sentenced to death, but the N.C. Supreme Court stayed his execution in 2000 after one of his appellate attorneys admitted that he intentionally botched Tucker’s appeal. Tucker currently has a pending appeal in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina as well as a separate appeal in Forsyth Superior Court. His attorneys filed a brief on his behalf on Thursday. It was a response to court papers filed in May by a prosecutor with the N.C. Attorney General’s Office.

    The crux of his latest appeal in Forsyth Superior Court is in a document entitled “Batson Justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives.” “Batson” refers to a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said prosecutors cannot get rid of potential jurors solely based on race. The decision involved the use of what are known as peremptory challenges, where prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys can remove a potential juror without giving a reason. A criminal defense attorney can object based on the Supreme Court decision if that attorney believes prosecutors are using race in removing jurors. And if asked by a judge, prosecutors have the opportunity to give a non-racial reason for removing the juror.

    The problem, according to Tucker’s attorneys, is that prosecutors didn’t really have non-racial reasons for removing every one of the five black people in the jury pool for Tucker’s trial. And that’s where the document comes into play.

    Elizabeth Hambourger and Mark Pickett, Tucker’s attorney, say the two Forsyth County prosecutors in the case — David Spence and Robert Lang — lifted language from the document when they gave their reasons in court for why they removed the black jurors. Words and phrases such as “inappropriate,” “monosyllabic,” “body language,” or a juror having “no stake in the community” came directly from the “Batson” document and were used as justifications for getting rid of black jurors, they argued.

    Attorneys for the N.C. Attorney General’s Office deny those allegations in court papers, arguing that the trial record clearly shows that race was not a factor in jury selection and that the “Batson” document simply re-enforced to prosecutors that they are not to consider race when deciding to remove a potential juror. Lang, now an Assistant U.S. Attorney, declined to comment. Spence, a prosecutor in Carteret, Craven and Pamlico counties, did not respond to a message left at his office Friday. Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill said he cannot comment on a pending case.

    Document in Racial Justice Act litigation

    Hambourger and Pickett said in court papers that they wouldn’t have found the document if it had not been for litigation surrounding the now-repealed Racial Justice Act. The Racial Justice Act became law in 2009, and more than 90 percent of death-row inmates filed claims under the law. The act allowed death-row inmates to challenge their death sentences if they believed racial bias played a role in their case. If they were successful, they could get their death sentences commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Republican state legislators repealed the Racial Justice Act in 2013, but there is still pending litigation.

    Errol Duke Moses, another death-row inmate from Forsyth County, also filed a claim. Under the law, inmates were allowed to use statistics and evidence from other cases to prove a pattern of racial discrimination. A judge ordered Forsyth County prosecutors to turn over their files in other death-penalty cases to Moses’ attorneys. That included Tucker’s case.

    And the “Batson” document was contained in those documents. State prosecutors said Tucker could have found that document earlier. Two previous attorneys for Tucker filed sworn affidavits saying that they did not see the “Batson” document in previous discovery.

    “The Batson Justifications document is central to Tucker’s claim because it places the prosecutor’s strike justifications in their true context,” Hambourger and Pickett write in a brief filed Thursday. “The existence of the document in the prosecutor’s file and the prosecutor’s use on the record of words and phrases obviously taken directly from the document show that the prosecutor did not have valid race-neutral reasons for his strikes — if he did, he would not have needed to refer to a list of prefabricated reasons prepared by someone else long before trial.”

    The use of the document by Lang shows that prosecutors were intentionally discriminating against blacks in jury selection, they said.

    “The document does not purport to train prosecutors on how to avoid bias in jury selections, or otherwise suggest alternate strategies to use that might avoid the taint of racial discrimination,” they write. “Rather, it quite openly directs prosecutors to use certain pre-packaged excuses when they face an objection for removing black ... members.”

    They said this is just one example of a long historical pattern of Forsyth County prosecutors disproportionately excluding blacks from juries. They cite a Michigan State University study, which was used in the majority of Racial Justice Act claims. That study said that from 1990 to 2010, Forsyth County prosecutors removed potential black jurors at a rate 2.25 times higher than they got rid of other jurors in death penalty cases.

    A recent study by three law professors at Wake Forest University found that in 2011, Forsyth County prosecutors struck potential black jurors from all types of jury trials at three times the rate they struck white potential jurors. That rate was higher than Durham, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro and Fayetteville, according to the motion.

    Danielle Marquis Elder, a senior state prosecutor with the N.C. Attorney General’s Office, denied those allegations in a written response filed in May in Forsyth Superior Court. She argues that Tucker should have raised these issues in earlier appeals and should not be allowed to raise them now.

    Elder also argued that Lang laid out reasons not contained in the “Batson” document for why he removed certain black jurors, including that one juror had fallen asleep. Another black juror was consistently vague about whether he supported the death penalty.

    Hambourger and Pickett said that Lang removed black jurors but allowed white jurors to remain, even though the white jurors were just as vague about their support of the death penalty as the black jurors.

    https://www.journalnow.com/news/crim...a9428de65.html
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
    1 A Prayer of David. Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit!

  4. #4
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    Allegations of racial discrimination are irrelevant in Forsyth County man's appeal of his murder conviction, prosecutors say

    By Michael Hewlett
    The Winston-Salem Journal

    In court papers filed this month, prosecutors say a Forsyth County man cannot use alleged patterns of racial discrimination to prove that race played a role in his conviction for killing a Winston-Salem Kmart security guard in the 1990s.

    Prosecutors reject the idea that race played any role in jury selection in Russell William Tucker's trial and argue that any allegation of racial discrimination in any other Forsyth County murder trial has no relevance in Tucker’s case.

    Tucker, 53, is on death row after a Forsyth County jury convicted him in February 1996 of first-degree murder in the shooting death of Maurice Travone Williams. Williams was a security guard at the former Kmart store on University Parkway. At trial, prosecutors allege that Tucker shot Williams in the chest on Dec. 8, 1994, after Tucker walked out of the store in clothing Williams believed Tucker had stolen.

    At issue in his latest appeal in Forsyth Superior Court is the use of peremptory strikes, which prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys can use to remove potential jurors without giving a reason. But prosecutors are prohibited by a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling from using race in making those decisions, and if challenged, prosecutors need to give a non-racial reason for removing a juror. Tucker’s attorneys, Elizabeth Hambourger and Mark Pickett, have argued that Forsyth County prosecutors Robert Lang and David Spence skirted that prohibition by using a training document to come up with pre-packaged non-racial reasons when challenged on excluding black people from the jury in Tucker’s case.

    Tucker’s attorneys also argue that Lang and Spence used similar strategies in other murder cases that they handled and that statistics show Forsyth County prosecutors removed black people from juries at a higher rate than they did white people. They have cited a Michigan State University study that said from 1990 to 2010, Forsyth County prosecutors removed potential black jurors at a rate 2.25 times higher than they got rid of other jurors in death penalty cases. A recent study by three law professors at Wake Forest University found that in 2011, Forsyth County prosecutors struck potential black jurors from all types of jury trials at three times the rate they struck white potential jurors, a rate higher than Durham, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro and Fayetteville.

    Prosecutors: No evidence of racial bias

    Danielle Marquis Elder and Jonathan Babb, prosecutors for the N.C. Attorney General’s Office, filed a written answer June 19 to an amended appeal in Tucker’s case. They argue that Tucker’s attorneys never provided any sufficient evidence that race played a role in jury selection at Tucker’s trial. They also argue that no pattern of racial discrimination has been proven and is not relevant to Tucker’s case. In many of those other cases, trial and appellate courts rejected the allegations of racial discrimination and those issues cannot be raised in Tucker’s appeal.

    “Even if this court were to consider various strikes from various cases tried in Forsyth County, Tucker has nonetheless failed to show that the prosecutors in his case were motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent in exercising these three peremptory challenges,” Elder and Babb said.

    They point to one of the cases that Tucker’s attorneys cite as a pattern of alleged racial discrimination — Robbie Lyons, who was executed in 2003 for killing a store clerk. Lyons’ trial took place, Elder and Babb argue, before prosecutors went to a training where the document entitled “Batson Justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives” was first presented. The document’s name comes partially from the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Batson V. Kentucky, which prohibited the use of race in jury selection.

    Hambourger and Pickett said Spence and Lang pulled language from the document to justify removing black people from juries.

    The document used language based on racist stereotypes and that the prosecutors accepted white people with traits similar to those used to reject black jurors. For example, in the Lyons’ case, Lang rejected a black woman because she was a nurse but accepted three white nurses and one white doctor.

    The N.C. Court of Appeals found that Spence discriminated against potential black jurors in the case of Henry Jerome White, who is serving a life sentence for killing a Winston-Salem man during a robbery. That wasn’t enough to overturn White’s conviction because at the time, criminal defendants had to prove that prosecutors excluded black people from juries solely on the basis of race. Since then, the law has changed.

    Spence mentioned the fact that two women he had struck were “black females,” but Elder and Babb said while they didn’t want to re-litigate the Court of Appeals decision, it was possible that Spence was merely acknowledging the race and gender of the women, rather than proof that Spence was discriminating against the women.

    Attorneys disappointed

    In an interview Tuesday, Hambourger said she was disappointed with state prosecutors’ arguments, especially in light of recent protests over racial injustice and the killing of black people by police. History and context are necessary in considering a claim of racial discrimination in jury selection, she said.

    “There is a real tendency in society to look narrowly at racial questions,” she said. “If you look simply at George Floyd (the 46-year-old Black man who died after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes), this is one tragic incident. When you combine that with Mike Brown, Tamir Rice ... and many people we don’t name, you see a pattern. Attempts to narrow it down and say ‘We’re not going to look at context’... it’s a tactic to deny the existence of racism.”

    “I’m bothered that they’re making that argument today after what we’ve seen in this country in the last month or so,” Hambourger said.

    A hearing on Tucker’s appeal has not been set.

    https://www.journalnow.com/news/loca...12b61dba5.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #5
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Forsyth County judge denies appeal of death-row inmate who claimed prosecutors excluded black jurors at trial

    A Forsyth County judge has denied the appeal of a death-row inmate who claimed that prosecutors lifted language from a training document to provide ready-made race-neutral reasons for removing black jurors from his trial.

    Russell William Tucker, 53, is on death row after a jury convicted him in February 1996 of 1st-degree murder in the death of Maurice Travone Williams, a security guard at a Kmart store on University Parkway in Winston-Salem. Prosecutors alleged that Tucker shot Williams in the chest on Dec. 8, 1994 after Tucker walked out of the Kmart store in clothing Williams believed Tucker had stolen.

    In his appeal in Forsyth Superior Court, Tucker's attorneys have argued that David Spence and Robert Lang, the prosecutors in Tucker's trial, used language from a training document to provide ready-made race-neutral reasons when defense attorneys accused them of using race to exclude black jurors. A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Batson V. Kentucky said prosecutors are not supposed to use race to get rid of potential jurors. That decision focused on what are called peremptory challenges. Prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys can use peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors without giving a reason. But if a challenge is made based on the Batson decision, a judge can give a prosecutor a chance to give a non-racial reason for removing a juror.

    And in Tucker's case, Lang and Spence pulled language from a document called "Batson Justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives" to exclude black jurors, Tucker's attorneys, Elizabeth Hambourger and Mark Pickett, argued in court papers. And Tucker's attorneys cited Ibram X. Kendi, a historian, in saying that the language was based on racist stereotypes. They further argued that the non-racial reasons used to remove black jurors did not disqualify white jurors.

    Those reasons included working in the health care industry, being single, not having sufficient stake in the community and appearing to be ambivalent in whether they could recommend the death penalty, Hambourger and Pickett have argued in court papers.

    But Judge Stuart Albright of Forsyth Superior Court issued a decision Aug. 24, rejecting all those arguments. Albright said that at his trial, Tucker failed to make a case that prosecutors were using race to discriminate against black jurors. And more importantly, Albright said, Tucker did not challenge the jury selection process at his trial in previous appeals.

    Tucker also can't maintain that the "Batson Justifications" document is newly discovered evidence, Albright ruled. Tucker's attorneys could have discovered that document through a public records request to the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys. The document, he said, was part of required training that attorneys have to take to keep their law license and that the document is supposed to contain accurate and relevant legal information. The race-neutral reasons found in the document, he said, are based on appellate cases in federal and state courts.

    "There is nothing wrong or improper with knowing legally permissible and impermissible reasons to exercise peremptory challenges," he said in the decision. "In fact, being prepared for trial requires defense attorneys and prosecutors to know legally permissible and impermissible reasons to exercise peremptory challenges."

    Hambourger and Pickett have said they wouldn't have found the training document if it had not been for litigation surrounding the now-repealed Racial Justice Act. That law allowed death-row inmates to challenge their death sentences if they believed racial bias played a role. Republican state legislators repealed the law in 2013, but there is still pending litigation. The N.C. Supreme Court recently vacated the death sentence of a Fayetteville man, ruling that the repeal cannot be retroactive.

    Errol Duke Moses, another death-row inmate from Forsyth County, filed a claim under the Racial Justice Act. Under the law, inmates were allowed to use statistics and evidence from other cases to prove a pattern of racial discrimination. A judge ordered Forsyth County prosecutors to turn over their files in other death-penalty cases to Moses' attorneys. That included Tucker's case.

    And the "Batson" document was contained in those documents. State prosecutors said Tucker could have found that document earlier. Two previous attorneys for Tucker filed sworn affidavits saying that they did not see the "Batson" document in previous discovery.

    Albright ruled that other Forsyth County cases were not relevant to Tucker's case either because defendants in those cases did not raise the issue of racial discrimination in jury selection in their appeals or because appellate courts flatly rejected their arguments about such allegations.

    Hambourger said Thursday that she and Pickett plan to appeal Albright's decision to the N.C. Supreme Court. Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill has previously declined to comment because the case was pending. Spence and Lang have also previously declined to comment.

    "We are disappointed that the judge ignored such clear evidence of race discrimination, both in Mr. Tucker's individual trial and historically in the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office," she said. "The judge's decision ignores our own state supreme court's recent decision on this issue, and so we are thus hopeful that the high court will correct this injustice."

    In May, the N.C. Supreme Court ruled that judges need to give more scrutiny to allegations of racial discrimination in jury selection. The ruling involved the case of Cedric Hobbs, a Cumberland County man convicted of killing 2 people during an armed robbery. The court ruled 6-1 that the trial judge failed to take into consideration evidence that race was a key factor in excluding black jurors.

    (source: Winston-Salem Journal)
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  6. #6
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,316
    NC Supreme Court: Death row prisoner says Black jurors excluded from his murder trial

    By Virginia Bridges
    The Raleigh News & Observer

    Russell William Tucker was a Black man on trial for murder in North Carolina in 1996. He was accused of killing Maurice Travone Williams, 23, a Kmart security guard shot to death on his first day of work two years before.

    The evidence against Tucker was substantial, but two Winston-Salem prosecutors didn’t depend on that alone to win a conviction, Tucker’s lawyers say. Instead, they skirted the law to make sure an all-white jury sat in judgment of him.

    Prosecutors used a “cheat sheet” from a seminar dubbed Top Gun Il that taught prosecutors across the state how to get around a U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbidding the rejection of jurors based on race, Tucker’s argument to the state Supreme Court states.

    “Prosecutors were encouraged to paint Black jurors as exhibiting ‘resistance to authority,’ an ‘air of defiance,’ ‘lack of eye contact,’ and ‘anti-prosecution tendencies,” Tucker’s filing states about the Top Gun II training held by the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys.

    The result, Tucker’s attorneys argue, is Tucker was convicted and sentenced to death by an all white jury.

    On Wednesday, about 27 years after his conviction, his attorneys asked the North Carolina Supreme Court to order a new trial.

    MORE THAN ONE MAN’S FATE AT STAKE

    Civil rights advocates say the Supreme Court has an opportunity with Tucker’s case to correct one injustice, and to also clarify what claims it will accept as evidence that prosecutors unfairly excluded jurors because they are Black.

    “The exclusion of Black people from juries is a long-standing problem in North Carolina stretching back to the days of Jim Crow,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of The Center for Death Penalty Litigation, in a statement. “But rarely is the evidence so clear as in Mr. Tucker’s case.”

    About half of the 137 people on death row in this state were convicted with juries that were all white or had one person of color, according to the center, which is representing Tucker.

    North Carolina courts are behind other neighboring states in terms of enforcing a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision that prevents prosecutors from excluding jurors on the basis of race, Ian Mance, an attorney for civil rights organization Emancipate NC, wrote in a Campbell Law Review article.

    Until last year, no North Carolina convictions had been overturned in response to the decision. The situation allowed prosecutors to strike prospective Black and Hispanic jurors with impunity, according to center.

    CAN JUSTICES CONSIDER JUROR DISCRIMINATION?

    However, before the Supreme Court can consider whether prosecutors excluded jurors based on their race, they must decide whether they can even consider Tucker’s arguments about jury selection for his trial.

    A Superior Court judge previously denied Tucker’s motion to have his conviction vacated, saying he couldn’t consider the jury selection argument because no new evidence has been presented.

    It was the appeal of that judge’s decision that led to the case being heard before the Supreme Court Wednesday.

    Senior Deputy Attorney General Danielle Elder also contends the cheat sheet isn’t new evidence. Tucker should have raised the concern, which was brought up at the trial, sooner in his many previous appeals and motions to have his convictions vacated, she argued.

    Tucker’s attorneys contend they didn’t discover the cheat sheet until 2015 after it was provided as evidence in another Forsyth County case. But Elder contends it was provided to Tucker’s defense team much sooner.

    The Superior Court judge also rejected a Michigan State University study as new evidence. It showed that one of the prosecutors in Tucker’s trial struck 62% of Black jurors and only 20% of white people in four of his cases.

    There were legitimate reasons for at least three Black jurors to be dismissed, Elder contends in court documents.

    Prosecutors didn’t seat two Black men on the jury who said they were reluctant to impose the death penalty, Elder contends.

    A third Black juror, who fell asleep during jury selection, said her shift work made it hard to stay awake during the trial.

    Tucker’s attorneys argued that white jurors who had similar concerns were allowed on the jury.

    The 1994 killing happened after Tucker had stolen clothes and pulled out a gun when Williams and others who initially tried to stop him from leaving the Kmart.

    Tucker fired at Williams and others as they ran away. Tucker later opened fire on a police car, injuring two others.

    https://www.newsobserver.com/news/lo...272212998.html
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  7. #7
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,316
    NC Supreme Court says no new trial for man on death row

    BY KELAN LYONS
    ncnewsline.com

    The North Carolina Supreme Court published a ruling Friday that a Black man on death row should not be given a new trial despite that he’d been sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors used a handout to strike Black people from the jury pool.

    Russell William Tucker was sentenced to death in 1996 for killing a security guard outside a Kmart in Forsyth County. He has since challenged that conviction, arguing that prosecutors relied on racist jury strikes to send Black jurors home and ensure that those who decided his death sentence were all white.

    The North Carolina Supreme Court disagreed. In a ruling written by Justice Phil Berger Jr., the son of the president pro tempore of the state Senate, the high court determined that their analysis of Tucker’s case was limited because he hadn’t raised juror discrimination issues in earlier appeals, and that his “newly discovered evidence” was insufficient to clear a procedural hurdle that could allow them to grant him a new trial.

    Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling was rooted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision published in 1986, Batson v. Kentucky, which found that prosecutors picking a jury in a criminal case could not use peremptory challenges — dismissing jurors without valid cause — to exclude prospective jurors solely on the basis of race.

    North Carolina’s Supreme Court was the last in the South to find a Batson violation. The first time it did so was in a in a May 2020 decision — written by the then-Democratic majority — that gave lower courts guidance on how to better assess racial discrimination claims in jury selection. In 2022, for the first time in state history, the high court struck down a conviction because of discrimination against a Black juror.

    Advocates worried those wins would be reversed under the conservative majority that has assumed control of the court, a fear that looks increasingly well-founded as Republican justices continue to issue rulings that find no racial discrimination in jury selections.

    Tucker’s claim was based in part on a handout that listed 10 reasons attorneys can cite to legally justify peremptory challenges. Tucker’s attorneys said prosecutors used that handout to strike jurors because of their race. Berger disagreed.

    “The CLE [Continuing Legal Education] handout simply displayed legally permissible reasons for exercising peremptory challenges,” Berger wrote.

    The other element of Tucker’s argument was based on a study conducted by two professors at Michigan State University’s College of Law. They researched jury selection in capital cases in North Carolina between 1990 and 2010, finding that African Americans were struck at a rate 2.25 times higher than other prospective jurors in Forsyth County.

    Berger said the study was “unreliable and fatally flawed” because it “assumed racial animus in cases in which defendants did not make any such claim, or in which the trial court or appellate courts did not make or sustain any such findings.”

    In a statement, Henderson Hill, an attorney and board member on the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, called Friday’s ruling a step backwards from those issued in 2020 and 2022.

    “Even in cases where a defendant faces execution, the court appears determined to blind itself to glaring evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection,” Hill said. “Russell Tucker, a Black man, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury because prosecutors methodically and intentionally removed every potential Black juror. I am deeply disappointed that our supreme court has chosen to ignore the evidence and allow a racist death sentence to stand.”

    Others said the ruling was proof the courts will not act to spare people from death row.

    “Despite evidence of widespread discrimination, our state’s highest court will not stop racist death sentences from being carried out,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

    Nickle called on Gov. Roy Cooper to commute the death sentences of 136 people on North Carolina’s death row before he leaves office at the end of 2024. Click here to read an in-depth NC Newsline story on the death row clemency campaign.

    https://ncnewsline.com/2023/12/17/nc...-on-death-row/
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •