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Thread: North Carolina Racial Justice Act

  1. #121
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Race and the death penalty: Arguments ongoing in N Carolina

    By MARTHA WAGGONER
    The Associated Press

    RALEIGH, N.C. — Four death row prisoners will argue to North Carolina’s highest court that racial bias so infected their trials that they should be resentenced to life in prison as attorneys revive arguments about a repealed law on race and capital punishment.

    The state Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday and Tuesday in the cases of four death row inmates who briefly were resentenced to life without parole when legislators approved the Racial Justice Act in 2009. The law was repealed four years later.

    Justices also will hear from attorneys for two other death row prisoners whose RJA claims weren’t decided before the law was repealed.

    “We found the evidence (of racial bias), then the legislature repealed the law,” said David Weiss, staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “The question is: Can we act as if that evidence was never uncovered?”

    The center describes differing types of racial bias in all the cases, including prosecutors who described a black juror with a criminal history as a “thug” while using “a fine guy” to describe a white juror who had trafficked in drugs. But it said that a statistical study showed in all the cases that prosecutors struck qualified black jurors at far higher rates than white jurors. In some cases, an all-white jury decided the fate of the defendants sentenced to death row.

    Under the RJA, condemned men and women could challenge their death sentences by using statistics to show that race tainted their trials. When Republicans took control of the legislature and amended the law in 2012, they set a new limit on what statistics can be used and said those numbers alone couldn’t be used to show race was a significant factor in a death row prisoner’s conviction or sentence.

    Legislators repealed the law in 2013, and the four who had been resentenced to life behind bars were returned to death row. They include Christina Walters, one of just three women on North Carolina’s death row.

    Sen. Floyd McKissick, a sponsor of the 2009 RJA, said the act didn’t go far enough in making amends for the unfairness of the trials and sentences of African American defendants. “RJA is a remedy, but the remedy did not fit the egregiousness of what these defendants suffered,” he said. “Rather than having sentences changed from death to life without parole, they really should have been given a new trial that was free of racial bias.”

    North Carolina has 142 people on death row. Fifty-two, or about 36 percent, are white. The other 90 prisoners, or about 63 percent, are black, Native American or other. The overall state population is almost 71 percent white.

    A spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, which is fighting the RJA claims, declined to comment on pending litigation. In legal filings, Senior Deputy Attorney General Danielle Marquis Elder writes that the issue before the justices is a narrow one about whether lower courts correctly voided the RJA claims after the act was repealed.

    She also writes that the prisoners can raise claims of racial discrimination through other procedures. “The repeal of the RJA removed only one mechanism for raising a statutorily defined claim of racial discrimination; it did not impede criminal defendants from asserting constitutional claims of racial discrimination through other mechanisms,” she wrote.

    One of those methods would be through making what’s called a Batson claim, based on a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision that qualified jurors can’t be kicked out of jury pools because of their race or gender. But North Carolina’s Supreme Court “has never once found a substantive Batson violation” in the 74 cases that it’s heard, according to a 2016 report for the North Carolina Law Review.

    And in 1995, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys offered training called Top Gun II , where prosecutors learned to overcome Batson problems.

    “One of the big takeaways from the Racial Justice Act is that when we look behind the curtain” there’s evidence of racial bias, Weiss said. “The legislature suspected it when they passed the law. And then when we looked even further, we found troubling, specific evidence in each of the individual cases.”

    https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-...S_nation-world
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  2. #122
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    NC's highest court rules racial justice cases should be heard

    In a pair of rulings Friday, the N.C. Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that death row inmates who had appealed their sentences under the state's Racial Justice Act should still get a hearing despite that law's repeal.

    The rulings address two specific cases, those of Rayford Burke and Andrew Ramseur. They were among 130 inmates who had RJA appeals pending when state lawmakers repealed the Racial Justice Act in 2013.

    In 2009, after several high-profile cases in which black men were proven to be wrongly convicted, the Democratic-led legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, which allowed death row inmates to seek to have their sentences commuted to life without parole if they could prove that racial bias may have tainted their trials.

    In 2013, after the legislature changed to a Republican majority, the law was repealed, and the statute included a provision dismissing the pending cases. Burke and Ramseur appealed, and the court agreed that inmates with pending cases at the time of the repeal are entitled under the state constitution to present their case to the courts.

    Both Ramseur and Burke were convicted by all-white juries in Iredell County.

    Justice Anita Earls, writing for the Democratic majority, wrote, “The harm from racial discrimination in criminal cases is not limited to an individual defendant, but rather it undermines the integrity of our judicial system and extends to society as a whole.”

    Four other RJA cases remain before the court. Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters, and Tilmon Golphin initially won their RJA cases, but all four were overturned on appeal.

    Death penalty opponents called the decision "momentous."

    “The evidence in these death penalty cases was stark and undeniable. The very least we can do is allow it to be heard in court," said Duke Law professor Don Beskind, an attorney who took part in the cases. "Even our most conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices, most recently Justice Kavanaugh, have said that race discrimination in jury selection is a serious long-standing problem that courts must address.”

    https://www.wral.com/nc-s-highest-co...eard/19131657/
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  3. #123
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Alfred's Avatar
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    EDIT: Found out that the law worked differently than depicted in the article above.
    Last edited by Alfred; 06-05-2020 at 05:29 PM.

  4. #124
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    Death penalty opponents called the decision "momentous."
    Nothing more momentous then the state having to blow millions of dollars on these bs hearings.
    "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

  5. #125
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    I wonder if RJA will turn into destruction like Hurst did if North Carolina ever got a conservative Supreme Court? All the Democratic justices let this ruling stand the sole conservative justice voted to completely evaporate the law.
    Last edited by Neil; 10-28-2020 at 09:20 PM.

  6. #126
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    NC racial justice task force makes dozens of recommendations

    A task force commissioned by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has recommended far-reaching changes to police, criminal justice and court systems, with a goal of eliminating racial inequities.

    The report of the North Carolina Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice was released Monday.

    There are 125 recommendations on topics ranging from police training and body cameras to the death penalty and decriminalizing marijuana.

    The panel began in the days following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody. Many recommendations would need General Assembly approval.

    A state House committee approved its own recommendations Monday, with an emphasis on police standards.

    Read the recommendations here
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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  7. #127
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Among those recommendations there will certainly not be the recommendation that blacks stop committing a vastly disproportionate amount of crime, particularly violent crime, in comparison to the rest of the American population.

    https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s...ables/table-43

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