When the North Carolina Racial Justice Act was enacted one year ago, I felt immensely proud to be a North Carolinian. I know from devastating personal experience the importance of rooting out racial bias and injustice in our courtrooms.
As a 22-year-old college student in Burlington, I was brutally raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into my apartment while I slept. During the crime, I studied every feature of my rapist's face -- and my testimony sent a black man to prison for life.
Eleven years later, I found out I had identified the wrong man.
Ronald Cotton was released from prison in 1995, after DNA evidence showed that my rapist was Bobby Poole. Poole raped more women while I pursued vengeance against Ronald Cotton.
I see now that race played a strong role in Cotton's mistaken conviction.
Cotton was a poor black man with a criminal record. I was a white honor student headed for marriage and success. We inhabited different worlds, and it was too easy for me to see him as a rapist and criminal -- even though he was noticeably taller than the man whose appearance I had studied during that horrible night.
Studies show it is much more difficult to identify someone of a race other than your own.
Cotton had also dated white women, and the officers handling his case made it clear to him that they didn't approve.
In my case, I saw the many ways that lingering, and even unconscious, racism can lead to grave injustice. Now, the Racial Justice Act gives our state a chance to end racial bias in the courtroom -- at least in cases that decide life or death.
The law allows people facing the death penalty to present evidence that racial discrimination, whether intentional or not, played a part in their prosecution. The law is similar to civil-rights legislation in that it allows defendants to use statistical evidence, which can reveal patterns of discrimination.
If a defendant proves his claim, he will be re-sentenced to life without parole. This week, the first five-death row inmates -- all black men accused of killing white victims -- filed motions under the act.
In one case, the defendant was called a "n----" during testimony. In another, a juror later admitted that "bigotry" influenced his decision to vote for execution and said that "blacks do not care about living as much as whites do." But, as I know from my case, this surface-level discrimination may be only the tip of the iceberg.
New studies released in recent weeks found that qualified black jurors are being excluded from capital trials at disproportionate rates, and that more than 40 percent of North Carolina's 159 death-row inmates were tried by juries that were all-white or had only one minority member. The studies also showed that people who kill whites are at least 2.6 times more likely to get a death sentence in North Carolina than those who kill blacks.
I will always live with the guilt and shame of unjustly accusing Ronald Cotton. I can never return the 11 years I took from him. But when the evidence proved I was wrong, I admitted my mistake and the court system set him free. However belatedly, justice was served. Years later, I asked for his forgiveness and, mercifully, he gave it.
Now, our state has compelling evidence that inmates set to be executed received their sentences because of racial bias -- and we must right that wrong as well, by converting their sentences to life in prison.
Only then can we begin to heal the wounds of a legacy of injustice.
Jennifer Thompson of Forsyth County is the author, with Ronald Cotton, of Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption. The Journal welcomes original submissions for North Carolina Voices on local, regional and statewide topics. Essay length should not exceed 750 words. The writer should have some authority for writing about his or her subject. Our e-mail address is: Letters@wsjournal.com. You may also mail a typed essay to: Letters to the Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. Please include your name and address and a daytime telephone number.
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