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Thread: North Carolina Capital Punishment News

  1. #61
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Judge Ammons volunteers to remove himself from hearing four racial bias cases

    A Cumberland County judge on Thursday removed himself from presiding over the cases of four people who in 2012 used a racial bias law to get off North Carolina's death row.

    During a hearing at the Cumberland County Courthouse, Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons said he was stepping aside to prevent any allegations about his ability to be fair from clouding the cases.

    The N.C. Supreme Court in December overturned the 4 inmates' reprieves and sent their cases to Ammons for new hearings under the state's controversial Racial Justice Act.

    Convicted murderers Marcus Reymond Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters in 2012 were the first and only prisoners in the state to use the Racial Justice Act to get their death sentences commuted to life in prison without parole. The law, which was repealed in 2013, allowed death row inmates to attempt to prove racism was a factor in their cases and, based on the racism, overturn their death sentences.

    The 4 defendants persuaded now-retired Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks there was racial bias on the part of prosecutors in the selection of the juries that convicted the defendants and sentenced them to death.

    The defendants' lawyers since January filed many hundreds of pages of documents to argue that Ammons has conflicts of interest and biases that preclude him from presiding over these cases. They said he has professional and personal relationships with law enforcement and former colleagues in the Cumberland County District Attorney's Office that would keep him from fairly deciding whether Augustine, Walters, Robinson and Golphin should again be removed from death row.

    The lawyers accuse some of Ammons' former colleagues of racial bias and have noted that his brother-in-law used to be head of the N.C. Highway Patrol. One of Golphin's victims was a Highway Patrol trooper.

    In the court papers and again at Thursday morning's hearing, the lawyers alleged that Ammons showed racial bias when he was a prosecutor in the 1980s and used peremptory challenges to prevent several blacks from serving on a jury in a death penalty trial.

    Ammons, his voice raised sometimes in apparent anger, said he could fairly decide the cases.

    "I have sworn to administer judgment without favoritism to anyone or to the state. I will not violate those oaths for anyone or anything," he said.

    Later, he formally denied the defense lawyers' requests to recuse himself.

    But moments after that Ammons announced he would step aside.

    "As I looked out into this courtroom this morning, 2 things became very clear to me," he said.

    "No. 1: The enormous time, effort and expense these 9 defense counsel have devoted to the sole issue of replacing me with another judge.

    "No. 2: The continued burden of uncertainty and the toll of time that has happened over the last 25 years in some incidences, on all parties.

    "For these reasons, I will not allow my properly presiding over any of these cases to continue to be an issue when the court's true task should be determining the merits of these claims."

    Ammons said he would assign another judge or judges to take over the case. Defense lawyer Jay Ferguson and the others said Ammons should not be involved in the selection of any replacement judge "because of conflict and biases alleged in our motion to recuse."

    At that, Ammons said he would leave it up to the state Administrative Office of the Courts to pick the judge.

    A replacement judge will be appointed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, spokeswoman Sharon Gladwell said. "No timeline is established; however, appointments usually are made expeditiously," she said.

    Robinson, Augustine and Walters were in the courtroom Thursday and sat in shackles next to their lawyers. Golphin elected not to attend, but his lawyers were there on his behalf.

    About 50 spectators attended, including relatives of the defendants' victims.

    Robinson and an accomplice kidnapped, robbed and murdered teenager Erik Tornblom in 1991.

    Golphin and his brother, Kevin Golphin, killed Cumberland County Deputy David Hathcock and N.C. Highway Patrol Trooper Ed Lowry during a traffic stop on Interstate 95 in 1997.

    In 1998, Christina Walters led a gang that kidnapped 3 women, drove them to remote areas and shot them execution-style. Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore died, and the 3rd victim barely survived.

    Quintel Augustine was convicted of shooting Fayetteville police Officer Roy Turner Jr. to death in 2001. Augustine maintains his innocence.

    Afterward, Al Lowry, who was Ed Lowry's brother, criticized the proceedings.

    "They keep crying foul. The decision's been made for the death penalty. And we've been 19 years and counting. Nothing ought to take this long," he said.

    "No matter what judge they select, it's always going to be an excuse on their side."

    ----

    THE INMATES

    Marcus Reymond Robinson and an accomplice kidnapped, robbed and murdered teenager Erik Tornblom in 1991. 16 years later, Robinson was hours from being put to death before a judge halted all executions in North Carolina over legal questions about North Carolina's execution method.

    Tilmon Golphin and his brother Kevin killed Cumberland County Deputy David Hathcock and state Highway Patrol Trooper Ed Lowry during a traffic stop on Interstate 95 in 1997.

    In 1998, Christina Walters led a gang that kidnapped 3 women, drove them to remote areas and shot them execution-style. Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore died; the 3rd victim barely survived.

    Quintel Augustine was convicted of shooting Fayetteville police Officer Roy Turner Jr. to death in 2001. He maintains that he is innocent.

    HISTORY OF THE RACIAL JUSTICE ACT

    August 2009: North Carolina passes the Racial Justice Act. It allows death row inmates to seek review of racial influence in their cases. If discriminatory practices are found, the inmates' sentences can be converted to life in prison without parole.

    April 2012: Out of about 150 claims filed by death row inmates, Marcus Robinson of Cumberland County was the 1st defendant to present evidence alleging racial bias in his trial. Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks rules that racism affected Robinson's trial and converts his sentence to life in prison without parole.

    July 2012: Lawmakers amend the Racial Justice Act to make it more difficult for defendants to prove allegations of racism.

    October 2012: Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters and Tilmon Golphin - all convicted for Cumberland County homicides - present their Racial Justice Act cases.

    December 2012: Weeks rules that racism influenced their trials. He converts their sentences to life in prison without parole.

    June 2013: The legislature repeals the Racial Justice Act.

    December 2015: The state Supreme Court overturns Weeks' rulings in the Robinson, Augustine, Walters and Golphin cases and sends them back to Cumberland County Superior Court to be done again.

    http://www.fayobserver.com/news/crim...217d3e12c.html

  2. #62
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Dying for equality: Supreme Court ruling could affect NC death row inmates

    DURHAM - Inmates on death row in North Carolina could soon have new hearings thanks to a ruling in Georgia by the U.S. Supreme Court.

    A ruling last week by SCOTUS could give North Carolina death row inmates new avenues to challenge racial bias in capital trials and will force the state to confront discriminatory jury selection practices.

    The Court ruled 7 to 1 in a Georgia case, Foster v. Chatman, that prosecutors violated the Constitution by excluding African-Americans from the jury in a capital case, and that the Georgia courts made a huge mistake by refusing to consider evidence proving that discrimination, according to information from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.

    In the Georgia case, the prosecutor got rid of all four potential black jurors. While he gave the court “race-neutral” reasons for his strikes, the prosecutor’s notes showed that he highlighted the names of black jurors, marked them with a letter “B” and put them first on his list of jurors to strike.

    The prosecution also ranked the African-Americans in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors,” according to the CDPL.

    Similar evidence of discrimination in jury selection has been uncovered in North Carolina.

    Jay H. Ferguson is a capital defense attorney in Durham and said the ruling could mean new hearings since many of the people on death row in the state were convicted of a jury not of their peers.

    “There are almost 150 people on death row in North Carolina,” he said in a taped interview. “Almost half of those people were sentenced by juries that consisted of no more than one person of color. About 20 percent of people on death row today were sentenced by an all white jury.”

    There is too much diversity within the state for the lack of people of color on juries to be truly representational, according to Ferguson.

    “In a state as great and diverse as North Carolina, that’s absolutely unconscionable,” he said.

    Ken Rose is the senior attorney at The Center for Death Penalty Litigation and said he hopes the SCOTUS ruling means the laws against such procedures will now be enforced throughout the state and the country.

    “The court sent a message that we must stop making excuses and start enforcing the law against discrimination in jury selection,” he said. “The privilege and obligation to serve on a jury, regardless of race, is fundamental to our democracy. Yet, African-Americans in North Carolina are routinely denied the right to participate in the most important decisions our criminal justice system ever makes.”

    Lawyers like Ferguson who specialize in the death penalty say the ruling will give many men and women who are sentenced to death new rights to bring forward evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection at their own trials. Such evidence is usually barred if it is not introduced during the initial trial, according to the CDPL.

    The ruling also will compel North Carolina courts to enforce laws that prohibit race discrimination in jury selection.

    The N.C. Supreme Court has heard more than 100 cases where prosecutors were accused of intentionally getting rid of minority jurors, but it has never found a prosecutor’s explanation for striking a black juror to be a cover for race discrimination, despite compelling evidence that the practice of excluding black jurors is prevalent, according to the CDPL.

    “It has been illegal for three decades to exclude jurors based on race, but the reality is our courts have refused to enforce that law,” Rose said. “The U.S. Supreme Court said that we cannot continue to ignore this blatant racism in our death penalty system.”

    North Carolina tried to fix the problem of discrimination in jury selection in 2009 by passing the N.C. Racial Justice Act, which allowed death row inmates to present statistical proof that African-Americans were systematically excluded from their juries.

    Because of the Racial Justice Act, NCDL says North Carolina death row inmates have uncovered even stronger evidence of discrimination in jury selection than in the Georgia case:

    In a Cumberland County case, defense attorneys discovered a prosecutor’s handwritten notes that labeled prospective jurors with terms like “blk wino” and “blk, high drug neighborhood.”

    In a Forsyth County case, prosecutors struck all but a single black juror. According to a handwritten note attached to that juror’s questionnaire, he was accepted because he attended a “multiracial” church, rather than a black one, and went to “predominantly white schools.”

    Several N.C. prosecutors attended training, sponsored by the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, where they were given a cheat sheet of “race-neutral” excuses that they could use to justify their illegal strikes of black jurors.

    A comprehensive statewide study of capital cases from 1990-2010 found that prosecutors removed qualified black jurors from jury pools at more than twice the rate of white jurors. The disparity was even more pronounced when the defendant was black.

    The Racial Justice Act was repealed in 2013. More than 100 death row inmates who filed motions under the law are still pursuing their claims in court, but most have so far gone unheard.

    “The Supreme Court today reaffirmed the importance of the evidence those defendants uncovered,” said Rose. “North Carolina courts must finally begin to take this critical issue seriously. The illegal practice of excluding African-Americans from jury service must end.”

    http://www.morganton.com/news/dying-...37aa73ae8.html

  3. #63
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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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

  4. #64
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Executions won't resume in North Carolina any time soon

    Dixie Lowry Davis, whose husband was shot to death on Interstate 95 in 1997, has no expectation that Tilmon Golphin will be executed for the murder.

    "No, I don't. I really don't," Davis said Wednesday. She thinks that Golphin - sentenced to die for killing her husband, a state trooper, along with a deputy sheriff - is more likely to die in prison of natural causes.

    Criminal justice lawyers share Davis' assessment that it will be a long time before North Carolina carries out an execution again, if it ever happens. North Carolina's last execution was in August 2006 and its unofficial moratorium on the death penalty started in January 2007.

    Legal challenges to North Carolina's capital punishment laws pending in state and federal courts have forced executions to grind to a halt. And most death row inmates filed claims under the now-repealed Racial Justice Act, which allowed them to claim discrimination in their sentencing.

    These legal actions are keeping the state's 150 condemned inmates away from the death chamber.

    "Nobody is going to be executed as long as there is a motion pending in state or federal court that has not been heard," said Robeson County District Attorney Johnson Britt.

    "Nobody can tell you how long it's going to be, but I would expect, given all these different levels of litigation, it's probably going to be years before we would have any executions," said retired University of North Carolina law professor Richard Rosen.

    Defense lawyer Ken Rose with the North Carolina Center for Death Penalty Litigation is deeply involved in the issues that have stopped executions. There are three broad matters that the courts need to address, he said.

    Bad protocol?

    First, Rose said, are the continuing legal challenges to North Carolina's execution protocols. These are in North Carolina and federal courts.

    The protocol questions triggered North Carolina's execution hiatus in 2007, but the matters had been in court well before then.

    The issues in 2007 included the role of a doctor in executions, whether the drugs used in executions by lethal injection were causing intense pain as they killed the inmates and whether North Carolina prison officials illegally modified the execution protocols by not first getting approval from the state's top elected officials.

    Over the years, the courts resolved some of the legal questions and North Carolina eliminated the use of the pain-causing drugs that were being challenged. Also, the legislature, upset that executions have been stopped for so long, changed death penalty laws to try to circumvent the legal challenges and resume carrying out death sentences.

    The new laws fueled new legal motions by inmates.

    "What is the current method of execution in North Carolina? What is the protocol?" asks Rose, who represents death row inmates. "... Where is the drug coming from? What is the drug?"

    The Restoring Proper Justice Act of 2015, one of the laws aimed at restarting executions, has a provision to keep the company that produces the lethal drug a secret. Rose sees constitutional problems with that.

    "In order to determine whether or not the use of a particular drug is cruel and unusual punishment, does the defendant have a right to know what that drug is? Know the source of the drug?" Rose said.

    "You have a right to know enough detail to know if it's going to be unnecessarily torturous," Rose said.

    Lethal injection executions in other states have gone wrong. According to media reports, Oklahoma this past week halted all of its executions because an execution in 2014 was badly botched, and in 2015 the state was sent the wrong drug for use in lethal injection. Oklahoma now has plans to use nitrogen gas to kill its condemned inmates instead of lethal injection.

    In North Carolina, Rose wants to know what North Carolina does to ensure the competency of the drug manufacturer or compounding pharmacy that produces the drug for lethal injection. He wants to know the qualifications of the people carrying out the execution.

    "If the execution's botched and the drug doesn't kill the defendant in minutes, or even hours, what (are) the procedures that the state will use to revive the person - to prevent that person from just suffering without killing him?" Rose said. There appear to be no procedures in place for that contingency, he said.

    Racial Justice Act

    A second factor postponing executions is the North Carolina Racial Justice Act of 2009. Out of the state's 150 death row inmates, approximately 140 have made Racial Justice Act claims.

    The law gave death row inmates a chance to have their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole. They had to prove to a judge that racial bias tainted their trials and led to them receiving the death sentence.

    The law was repealed in 2013 - and that repeal gave the inmates more legal fodder postpone their execution dates.

    The issue is whether the repeal unconstitutionally snatched away a vested right when it repealed the Racial Justice Act, Rose said.

    Four inmates, all defendants in Cumberland County homicides, had Racial Justice Act hearings. In 2012, their sentences were commuted to life without parole, but the state Supreme Court said a procedural error by the judge tainted their hearings. They have been sent back to death row and new hearings are scheduled.

    The rest of the roughly 140 defendants who asked for Racial Justice Act hearings did not get them before the law was repealed.

    Lawyers for the state argue that the law that did away with the Racial Justice Act prevents the inmates from pursuing the claims they filed before it was repealed.

    The death row defendants may be able to beat that argument, said Rich Rosen, the retired UNC law professor.

    "The federal constitution says that once you give a right you can't willy-nilly deprive people of that right," he said.

    The four Racial Justice Act cases from Cumberland County are scheduled for a hearing Nov. 29 in Charlotte. A judge is to hear arguments that day on the state's motions to dismiss the cases.

    Separately, the North Carolina Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether the rest of the Racial Justice Act defendants can have hearings on their allegations that racism was a factor in their death sentences.

    Two of the Cumberland County defendants have additional cases pending in federal courts alleging that the state violated the double jeopardy clause in the U.S. constitution that when it returned the inmates to death row. The double jeopardy clause says that once a defendant is acquitted, he can't be tried again. Their claim attempts to apply the clause to the ruling overturning their death sentences, saying they can't be imposed again once they've been lifted by a judge.

    One of these inmates is Tilmon Golphin, who killed state Trooper Ed Lowry and Deputy David Hathcock in 1997. Lowry was Dixie Lowry Davis' husband. The other is Marcus Reymond Robinson, who killed a Fayetteville teenager in a robbery in 1991. Robinson was hours away from execution in January 2007 when North Carolina executions were halted.

    Discretion

    The third major factor delaying executions, Rose said, is a new angle of attack that defense lawyers are using to try to overturn death sentences handed down in North Carolina prior to July 1, 2001.

    That's when North Carolina implemented a major change to its death penalty laws, one that has drastically reduced the number of death penalty cases in this state.

    Before July 1, 2001, state law required local prosecutors to seek the death penalty if the facts surrounding the crime were sufficient. If a murder was especially heinous, for example, or committed to obtain something of value.

    Requiring that prosecutors seek the death penalty when certain elements were present resulted in dozens more death penalty trial and sentences. Prosecutors had no choice but to seek the maximum penalty.

    "North Carolina as a result was one of the top death-sentencing states in the country," Rose said. "And that changed dramatically after July 1, 2001."

    The law change in 2001 gave prosecutors discretion - freeing them to accept plea bargains that gave defendants sentences of life in prison without parole.

    In the 1990s, North Carolina sometimes sentenced 20 to 30 people to death annually, according to a chart by the Death Penalty Information Center. In the past 10 years, juries have issued five or fewer death sentences per year, its chart says.

    The old law that required prosecutors to seek death was unconstitutional, Rose argues.

    Stress on families

    Dixie Lowry Davis, Trooper Ed Lowry's widow, thinks Tilmon Golphin and his brother, Kevin Golphin, should have been executed shortly after they were sentenced in 1998 for Lowry's murder.

    Now she worries whether they will be released from prison.

    While Tilmon Golphin is on death row, Kevin Golphin, previously sentenced to death, is now serving life in prison and could become eligible for parole. Kevin Golphin was only 17 when he and Tilmon killed Lowry and Hathcock. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that defendants who were under 18 when they committed their crimes can't be sentenced to death and may not be automatically sentenced to life in prison without parole.

    "It's been so long, we're just all so frustrated," Davis said of her family. "We would like to see the end to it. But we don't want the end to be that they get out of jail. So we want them to stay right where they are."

    http://www.fayobserver.com/news/loca...941dadedc.html

  5. #65
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Editorial:

    Death penalty has its place in an orderly society


    By Charles Davenport, Jr.
    Greensboro News & Record

    Several weeks ago, North Carolina Rep. Justin Burr took to his Facebook page and advocated for a return of capital punishment. Opponents of the death penalty have hammered Burr ever since, not only on Facebook (where several responses are childishly profane), but also in the pages of this newspaper and Raleigh’s News & Observer. National magazines, including The Hill and Newsweek, have picked up the story.

    But according to nearly every reputable poll, most North Carolinians continue to support capital punishment. This despite a relentless, years-long campaign against the death penalty from almost every mainstream news source.

    What explains the majority’s stubborn, unrelenting support for capital punishment?

    Maybe our priorities and those of the media elite are not the same. Among our top priorities is the preservation of order, which necessitates a reverence for and protection of the innocent and defenseless. The deliberate taking of such a life is incomprehensibly cruel and unforgivable. The ultimate punishment for such offenses is not only justified, but necessary: the offender receives punishment that is proportionate to his offense, and society sends a message that is unmistakable.

    North Carolina’s most recent execution (in 2006) provides a vivid example. In 1994, Samuel Flippen beat to death his 2-year-old stepdaughter, Britnie Nichole Hutton. Flippen was not executed until 12 years later.

    Opponents of the death penalty are in the awkward (if not impossible) position of arguing that the execution of Samuel Flippen was, somehow, a miscarriage of justice. But one could argue that the only injustice in the Flippen case is that it took the state about a decade too long to carry out the sentence. Since 2006, legal challenges have effectively created a moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina.

    A recent case in Michigan reminds us that lenient treatment of murderers can have catastrophic consequences. Twenty-five years ago, Gregory Green stabbed his wife to death. She was seven months pregnant at the time. (The infant also died.) Green served 16 years, was released from prison, and remarried. In September 2016, he killed his two biological daughters, aged 4 and 5, and both of his teenage stepchildren. The latter pair were shot to death in front of their mother, Green’s second wife, who was shot and stabbed, but survived. Maybe it’s time for Michigan to reconsider its ban on capital punishment.

    And Rep. Burr is correct: North Carolina needs to resolve its legal quagmire and resume executions. Our death row is occupied by 145 people. The oldest, Blanche Taylor Moore, is now in her mid-80s, and has eluded justice for a quarter-century.

    Despite the virtual moratorium on the death penalty, some prosecutors, including Assistant DA Robert Enochs, continue to seek the ultimate punishment. A local man, 29-year-old Garry Gupton, is on trial in Greensboro for the murder of Stephen White, 46, three years ago. As reported in these pages on Oct. 3, police “believe Gupton beat White before setting him on fire in Room 417 of the Battleground Inn at 1517 Westover Terrace.” Surgeons had to amputate both of White’s arms, and he died less than a week later.

    Faith Harris-Green, Gregory Green’s second wife, told her homicidal ex-husband at his sentencing hearing, “Your justice will come when you burn in Hell for all eternity for murdering four innocent children.” It’s a shame that the state of Michigan is unable to expedite Mr. Green’s long-overdue journey to Hell.

    http://www.greensboro.com/opinion/co...4870779c7.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

  6. #66
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    2 lawmakers push for executions in North Carolina

    ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. - North Carolina has not executed an inmate in more than a decade, and now two state lawmakers want to restart the death penalty.

    The announcement comes after the Pasquotank County district attorney announced this week he is seeking the death penalty against four inmates charged with killing four prison workers during an escape attempt in October.

    Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore called on the governor and attorney general to resume executing prisoners on death row.

    “Their failure to fight the moratorium on the death penalty endangers the lives of prison employees in close proximity to hardened murderers with nothing left to lose, who see no possibility they will face execution for killing again," the joint statement read.

    North Carolina has 143 inmates on death row but has not executed a criminal since 2006 because of legal challenges and concerns over the execution drugs.

    Investigators said four inmates attacked Pasquotank Correctional Institution guards with scissors and knives.

    One of the inmates, Wisezah Buckman, was in prison for the 2014 murder of Thurmont Davis in west Charlotte.

    Statement from Berger and Moore:

    The Pasquotank County District Attorney announced Wednesday he is seeking the death penalty against four inmates charged with first-degree murder in the brutal killings of three state correctional officers and a manager of a prison rehabilitative work program during an attempted escape from Pasquotank Correctional Institute in October. Their vicious attack with scissors and hammers also battered eight other employees.

    The inmates have lengthy violent rap sheets. One of the inmates was incarcerated for murdering a co-worker and injuring another behind a Charlotte gas station, one for stabbing a military wife with a kitchen knife 15 times, one for shooting a state trooper in the face, and one for first-degree burglary.

    On Friday, Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) called on Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein to restart the death penalty in North Carolina.

    “For over a decade, death penalty opponents like Roy Cooper and Josh Stein have imposed a de-facto moratorium on capital punishment in North Carolina, using every legal trick possible –including inaction – to delay death sentences handed down by juries and deny justice to victims,” said Berger. “No matter what they say, Cooper’s and Stein’s indifference and failure to fight the moratorium endangers the lives of prison employees in close proximity to hardened murderers with nothing left to lose, who see no possibility they will face execution for killing again.”

    “In light of the prosecutor’s decision to pursue the death penalty, Governor Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein need to make certain, should a jury sentence these men to death, that those sentences are carried out,” said Moore.

    North Carolina currently has 143 inmates on death row, and has not conducted an execution since 2006 due to a slew of legal challenges that have resulted in a de-facto moratorium on the death penalty.

    http://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/2-l...lina/660912176

  7. #67
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    N.C. death row becoming frail, aging

    BY BLADEN JOURNAL

    No new death sentences in 2017

    DURHAM — North Carolina juries rejected the death penalty in 2017, refusing to impose death sentences at any of the four trials where prosecutors sought them and making this year the third since 2012 with no new death sentences.

    Juries in Wake, Granville and Guilford counties all chose life without parole instead of death this year. At a fourth capital trial in Robeson County, the jury said the defendant was guilty only of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to a term of years.

    Only a single person has been sent to N.C. death row in the past three and one-half years, and most of the state’s district attorneys are no longer seeking the death penalty. North Carolina has not executed an inmate since 2006 because of ongoing litigation over the state’s lethal injection procedures and racial bias in capital trials.

    “There are some elected officials in North Carolina who still like to talk about the death penalty for political purposes, but that’s about the only way it’s being used anymore,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. “The reality is most citizens of North Carolina no longer have any use for the death penalty, not after seeing an innocent man like Henry McCollum spend 30 years there.”

    McCollum was released in 2014, after DNA testing proved he was innocent of the 1983 crime for which he was sentenced to death. Nationally, four more death row inmates were exonerated in 2017, bringing the total to 160. A Gallup poll released in October found that Americans’ support for the death penalty had reached its lowest point in 45 years.

    Also in 2017, more questions of innocence arose in North Carolina. Michael Patrick Ryan, who was sentenced to death in 2010 in Gaston County, is awaiting a new trial after a judge ruled in February that misleading DNA evidence was used against him and prosecution investigators intimidated Ryan’s alibi witnesses. Scant credible evidence remains against Ryan, who has always claimed his innocence.

    Phillip Davis from Buncombe County was also removed from death row in February and resentenced to life without parole after the court found that race played an improper role in selecting the all-white jury that sentenced him to death. Davis, who was just a few months past his 18th birthday at the time of the crime, spent 20 years on death row before being resentenced.

    North Carolina’s death row also shrunk this year because five inmates died of natural causes. Today, 140 men and three women remain on death row. Almost half, 69 of them, are 50 or older. More than three-quarters of death row inmates were sentenced at least 15 years ago, in an era when North Carolina juries sentenced to death dozens of people a year under less enlightened laws.

    At the time, the law forced prosecutors to go after the death penalty in almost every first-degree murder case, even when they believed the circumstances called for mercy or there were questions of innocence. Defendants on trial for their lives did not have basic protections such as qualified attorneys or laws requiring that confessions be recorded.

    “If we were to restart executions, we would be putting to death people who were tried decades ago without basic legal protections,” Engel said. “Executions would do nothing to solve the problems of today. We would be better served to choose life imprisonment instead and divert the millions of dollars we spend on the death penalty to law enforcement and corrections officers, who unlike the death penalty, make our society safer.”

    The Center for Death Penalty Litigation is a non-profit law firm in Durham, N.C., that represents people on North Carolina’s death row.

    http://www.bladenjournal.com/news/15...ng-frail-aging

  8. #68
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Has the death penalty come to an end in NC?

    BY THE OBSERVER EDITORIAL BOARD

    From an editorial Thursday in the Fayetteville Observer:

    This case is about the constitutional protection every person in America deserves. It is not about whether Marcus Reymond Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters and Tilmon Golphin deserve our sympathy. They don’t.

    Golphin and his brother killed a Cumberland County deputy and a state trooper in a 1997 traffic stop. Walters led some gang members on an initiation ritual that saw two women randomly kidnapped and killed in 1998. Augustine killed a Fayetteville police officer in 2001 – although he claims he was wrongfully convicted and is factually innocent. And Robinson killed a teenager in a 1991 robbery.

    The crimes was horrific enough that they challenged our opposition to the death penalty.

    But that’s the other factor here: The public and even many politicians are losing their taste for executions. The last one in North Carolina was 12 years ago and there are none scheduled, despite having 143 inmates on death row. If this state is caught up in the national trend, it’s possible that the death penalty has already come to a de facto end.

    These four were removed from death row in 2012 when a judge found black jurors were illegally blocked from serving on their juries. Under the provisions of the state’s Racial Justice Act, passed in 2009, their sentences were changed to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.

    The state appealed that verdict and in 2015 the N.C. Supreme Court said the trial judge had erred in the way he held the hearing and the state deserved another chance to make its case. The four killers were returned to death row. And around the same time, the General Assembly repealed the Racial Justice Act.

    But now the four say their 5th Amendment rights against double jeopardy were violated when their death sentences were reinstated. The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the amendment to mean that once a death sentence has been revoked for a specific crime, it can’t be reimposed.

    As for whether the four should be executed, that’s another question that also seems separate from this appeal. It appears the state has distanced itself from carrying out executions, but politicians lack the backbone to discuss the issue and decide whether it’s time to change this state’s maximum penalty for capital crimes to life without parole.

    The best we can expect from this case is a simple ruling on a 5th amendment issue. We’ll have to wait for another time to see the debate we really need to have.

    https://www.charlotteobserver.com/op...#storylink=cpy
    Last edited by Moh; 07-22-2018 at 03:53 AM. Reason: Removed editorial on breast milk
    In the Shadow of Your Wings
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  9. #69
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Most people on NC death row don’t belong there, new report says. Here’s why.

    BY MICHAEL GORDON
    The Charlotte Observer

    With 142 inmates waiting to die, North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the country.

    But a report released Tuesday says most of the prisoners would not be awaiting execution if their cases were investigated and tried today.

    In “Unequal Justice: How obsolete laws and unfair trial created North Carolina’s outsized Death Row,” the Center for Death Row Litigation in Durham says the state’s death row is stuck in time while the views of capital punishment continue to evolve.

    “They are prisoners of a state that has moved on, but refuses to reckon with its past,” the report says. “Today, the death penalty is seen as a tool to be used sparingly. Instead of a bludgeon to be wielded in virtually every first-degree murder case.”

    According to the report, almost three-quarters of the men and women on N.C. death row were tried before 2001. That’s when a series of reforms — from how police and prosecutors handle investigations and share evidence to DNA testing and higher performance standards for defense attorneys — began reducing the number of capital cases.

    The state also eliminated a law — the only one of its kind in the country — that forced prosecutors to seek the death penalty in every case of aggravated, or first-degree, murder.

    “If these people on death row had been tried under modern laws, most of them would be serving life without parole sentences instead of facing execution,” said Gretchen Engel, executive director of the litigation center, in a statement accompanying the report.

    Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather was not available for comment Tuesday.

    More than 100 of the condemned inmates were convicted in the 1990s, when the state operated under radically different laws, Engel says.

    Today, the state’s death row inmates are stuck in legal limbo. North Carolina has not executed a prisoner in 12 years.

    Juries across the state have handed down only a single death penalty in the past four years, the report says. Mecklenburg County, the state’s largest local court district has not sent a prisoner to death row in almost a decade.

    The Durham-based center compiled the report based on the case files of the death penalty Among the report’s findings:

    ▪ 92 percent of the death row prisoners were tried and convicted before a 2008 reform package aimed at limiting false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications.

    ▪ 82 percent, 118 prisoners in all, were sent to death row before North Carolina passed a law giving the defense the right to view all the prosecution’s evidence. Up to then, district attorneys routinely withheld vital information until it was presented at trial, giving the accused little time to prepare a defense, the report says.

    ▪ 73 percent of the death row population, 103 inmates in all, were sent there before the passing of laws barring the execution of people with intellectual disabilities.

    ▪ That same percentage were convicted before the state eliminated the only law in the country that required prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in every aggravated first-degree murder case. Now, district attorneys have the discretion to limit death penalty cases to the most heinous of crimes.

    The impact of those reforms has been significant. In the 1990s, according to the report, North Carolina averaged about 50 death-penalty murder cases a year. Today, there are fewer than five.

    Mistaken ID

    Mistaken identifications are a leading cause of wrongful convictions around the country, the report says. To illustrate, it homes in on the case against Elrico Fowler of Charlotte.

    In 1997, Fowler was sentenced to death in Mecklenburg for the murder of a Howard Johnson’s motel employee during a 1995 robbery in Charlotte. Four years later, his conviction and sentencing were upheld by the state Supreme Court.

    “Elrico Fowler executed an unarmed man lying face down on the floor,” one of his prosecutors said in 2001. “He’s an exceptionally dangerous human being, and the ultimate punishment is the only we can ensure he doesn’t murder another innocent person.”

    The report, however, says Fowler was largely convicted based on the questionable eye-witness identification of the manager of the motel restaurant. He told Fowler from the witness stand during the trial, “I hope you fry, man.”

    What the jury did not know, according to the report, is that the restaurant manager identified Fowler after weeks of shifting descriptions and after undergoing multiple photo lineups, including one that occurred after police had publicly circulated photographs of Fowler and another suspect.

    “Every practice now required to prevent false identification was violated,” according to the report. The lineups were not recorded. The police conducted them (now, someone who does not know the suspect’s identification must run the lineup), and the investigators did not take a statement from the witness on his level of confidence in the identification, among other missteps, the report says.

    Gerda Stein, a spokeswoman for the litigation center, said the goal of the report is to educate the public and decision-makers about the inequities in the state’s history with capital punishment.

    Eventually, she said, the center hopes that “these injustices” would be remedied by the courts, the General Assembly or the governor.

    https://www.charlotteobserver.com/ne...#storylink=cpy
    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!

  10. #70
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    More NC Jurors Reject the Death Penalty

    DURHAM, N.C. — For the first time in the state's modern history, North Carolina juries have rejected the death penalty for two consecutive years.

    There were only three capital trials in North Carolina this year - one each in Lee, Scotland and Wake counties. All three juries chose life without parole for the defendants instead of death sentences. Gretchen Engel, executive director at the Raleigh-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation, has represented clients on death row and said more jurors are becoming educated about bias in the legal system.

    "Jurors are turning away from the death penalty and, in response to less favorable jury pools, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty less,” Engel said. “And so, this trend away from the death penalty is really being led by citizens who've been summoned for jury duty."

    Engel said now, there's greater public awareness about factors like race, geography and economic status that play a role in determining a person's guilt or innocence. North Carolina also has been home to a number of high-profile wrongful convictions in the past decade.

    In light of these factors, death-penalty opponents ask why some prosecutors continue to seek it. In Wake County, juries have declined to issue death sentences in nine consecutive capital cases.

    Engel said capital trials also are longer and more complex, and therefore, more expensive. According to the N.C. Office of Indigent Defense Services, if the Wake County cases had not been tried as capital cases, taxpayers might have saved nearly $2.4 million.

    "So, the one outlier in North Carolina is Wake County, [which] year after year is having capital trials, losing those capital trials - and yet, continues to waste money and court time and resources,” she said.

    Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman has said, "There are times when the facts of the case are so egregious, so terrible, that we believe it's appropriate for the community to make the decision in the case through the jury process." North Carolina has not carried out any executions since 2006.

    https://www.publicnewsservice.org/20...nalty/a64944-1
    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!

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