There's little middle ground to be found in North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, which allows defense attorneys to use racial bias as an argument against the pursuit and imposition of the death penalty. Jim O'Neill, Forsyth County's new district attorney, supports the death penalty and says that its use has been "racially neutral" in the 13 years he has worked in the office. But, setting a new spirit of cooperation for his office, he agreed last week to delay a death-penalty case to await the results of a major study about capital punishment and race in North Carolina.
"It would be disingenuous to the public to schedule another capital case before the study is completed," O'Neill told the Journal.
He agreed to delay the case of Gerald Spease, whose murder trial was scheduled to start next month. Spease, charged with setting a fire June 17, 2006, that killed Tammy Dianne Wilson, faces the death penalty if convicted. Mark Rabil, an assistant capital defender, had moved to delay the trial, citing the Racial Justice Act that the state legislature passed in August. The Spease case involves a black defendant and victim. Rabil said he may have argued for a delay by saying that in similar, more heinous cases involving white defendants, the death penalty has not been in play.
Rabil also sought delays in three other murder cases. Those cases had not been put on the court calendar. O'Neill has no plans to do so until the study is done. He has scheduled the Spease case for September.
The $500,000 study being done by two law professors from Michigan State University is scheduled to be finished in August.
Rabil said that O'Neill is one of the toughest prosecutors in the state, but is willing "to take a good hard look at the issues."
O'Neill obviously realized that Rabil may well have prevailed in court with his motion to delay the cases. But other prosecutors, responding to the demands of their pro-death-penalty constituents, may have still waged the fight. O'Neill's predecessor, Tom Keith, was an outspoken critic of the Racial Justice Act, which Gov. Bev Perdue signed into law in August.
O'Neill, whom Perdue appointed to serve out the rest of Keith's term after he retired last month, is being criticized for his decision to delay the Spease case. But we believe that his action was pragmatic and fair given the racial tension over some criminal cases in Forsyth County.
The 1984 Deborah Sykes murder case, particularly the arrest and convinction of Darryl Hunt, created a long-running racial division in Winston-Salem. Sykes was white and Hunt, wrongly convicted of her murder, is black. Rabil finally won Hunt's release in 2003, after DNA testing led to the real killer. In response to that case and others, Forsyth County Reps. Larry Womble and Earline Parmon introduced the Racial Justice Act.
The act, and the study, could lead the way toward resolving longstanding questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system. The process will require a cooperative spirit from prosecutors -- like that shown by O'Neill last week.
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