What do you call people from North Carolina? Whatever that word is, they were faced with a choice: do they appear to be racist murderers or just plain Northeastern Liberal Sissies?
I know what I’d choose and I know what stereotype says that the North Carolinians would choose. And proving that stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, they chose the former. The Senate just repealed (here‘s the bill) the Racial Justice Act, which allows inmates to use statistics to prove that their death sentences are obtained based on racial injustice.
Just last year I was congratulating the Second in Flight State for a decision reversing the death sentence for a man who proved that racial bias played a significant role in the jury selection process. The opinion by Judge Weeks [PDF] said that:
Race played a “persistent, pervasive and distorting role” in jury selection and couldn’t be explained other than that “prosecutors have intentionally discriminated” against Robinson and other capital defendants statewide, Weeks said. Prosecutors eliminated black jurors more than twice as often as white jurors, according to a study by two Michigan State University law professors Weeks said he found highly reliable.
The opinion relied in part on a study [PDF] by Michigan State University. This was all made possible due to the Racial Justice Act, an avant-garde piece of legislation enacted in North Carolina that did exactly what the United States Supreme Court prohibited a quarter century ago in McCleskey v. Kemp.
The bill allowed death row inmates to use statistics to argue that the death penalty process was racially biased in their state (and study after studyhas shown that race – the race of the defendant and the race of the victim – plays a pivotal role in determining whether the death penalty will be sought and then imposed). You may also recognize McCleskey as the decision that Justice Powell wished he could change. Imagine living with that the rest of your life.
You know who doesn’t have that problem on their conscience? The legislators of North Carolina. Because today the Senate repealed the Racial Justice Act (a move they tried last year but which was vetoed by the Governor). They didn’t repeal it because it’s useless; they didn’t repeal it because they have a better shinier version. They repealed it because it did its job too well. They repealed it because inmates were proving, left and right, that the system was racially biased. And apparently keeping people on death row is far more important than having a fair criminal justice system:
Senate Republicans were spurred in their campaign by a Cumberland County judge’s findings last year that jury selection in the cases of four death-row inmates was tainted by conclusive evidence of racism, a ruling that automatically converted their sentences to life in prison without parole. Those were the first four of more than 150 challenges filed under the 2009 version of the law.
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The bill also seeks to invalidate the remaining Racial Justice Act claims that have not yet been heard in court – more than 140 in all.
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“We have a moral obligation to ensure that death-row inmates convicted of the most heinous of crimes imaginable finally face justice in North Carolina,” Sen. Thom Goolsby, the bill’s primary sponsor, said on the Senate floor.
Even Judge Weeks was the target of vile criticism:
But Sen. Wesley Meredith, a Fayetteville Republican, said Weeks should have recused himself, as the prosecutor requested, from hearing one of the cases that he had previously been involved in. “If we’re going to be fair and equitable and each one of these cases are going to stand on their own, then why do we need a minority judge who knew the case?” Meredith said. Weeks is African-American.
Unbelievable. The reaction of these people to repeated findings of systemic racism isn’t oh-my-God-we’re-so-sorry-this-is-horrible; it’s shit-let’s-close-the-curtains-before-we’re-exposed-for-the-racists-we-are.
Too late. The answer to the question I asked is racist. And if you reject that charge, you need to call your legislator and tell them to oppose repeal of the Racial Justice Act.
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