Death-penalty bias

A black defendant who got the death penalty in Stanly County being referred to in trial testimony as a "nigger from Wadesboro." A juror in a Randolph County case who said after the trial in which he voted for death for the black defendant that "blacks do not care as much about living as whites do."

These are extremes, but they illustrate an unavoidable point made in study after study, including two new ones: The imposition of the death penalty in North Carolina often comes with racial bias. It's past time for an official moratorium on the death penalty in this state.

It matters not whether that bias is unintentional or intentional. It matters not that there's little doubt about the guilt of most of these defendants. What should matter to every resident of this state is that when it comes down to imposing the ultimate punishment, a process that should meet the highest standards of fairness, one of the factors that undoubtedly influences many cases is the skin color of the defendant and victim. The percent of blacks on North Carolina's death row -- about 54 percent -- is more than twice as high as the percent of blacks in the general population. If you kill a white person, you're more likely to get the death penalty statewide. One possible factor: Prosecutors strike, or eliminate, potential black jurors from death-penalty trials of black defendants at alarming rates.

There's been an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina since 2006 as officials try to decide whether doctors should participate in executions. But eventually, they will resume. Meanwhile, the deadline for inmates on North Carolina's death row to appeal their cases under the state's Racial Justice Act is Tuesday. That act, which passed last year, allows defendants who may face the death penalty and prisoners who have received it to present statistics and other evidence of racial bias as arguments against the punishment. The new law provides that, if they win, they will be resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Lawyers making those appeals are drawing in large part from work done by researchers at Michigan State University. Their study is not complete, but the researchers have shared with the lawyers many of their findings. "The stats are just a way to make people confront the truth," said Tye Hunter of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit agency in Durham.

In Forsyth County, those findings are being used in the appeal of Jeremy Murrell, a black defendant sentenced to death in 2006 for the killing of Lawrence Matthew Harding, a white teenager, during a robbery outside the restaurant where Harding worked. Murrell then dragged the severely wounded Harding into Harding's car and eventually drove it to Richmond. Harding died somewhere along the way. Prosecutors struck 80 percent of the qualified black jurors in that case and just 26 percent of the qualified white jurors, according to the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. One of its lawyers is working on the Murrell appeal.

Jim O'Neill, the Forsyth County District Attorney, prosecuted that case along with Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Martin. The jury foreman was black, O'Neill said, and the Supreme Court of North Carolina did not find any improper jury selection as it upheld Murrell's death sentence. "The one factor we never consider is race," he said. "With the Racial Justice Act, that is exactly what we're moving toward, a consideration of race."

We've been impressed with O'Neill's emphasis on cooperation and fairness since he became the county's head prosecutor last year. We hope he'll bring that spirit to a careful consideration of the findings of the Michigan researchers. They found that in Forsyth County, prosecutors were 2.2 times more likely to strike qualified potential jurors who were black. From 1990 to 2009, they found, prosecutors here were 2.1 times more likely to bring a capital murder case to trial if there was at least one white victim. And cases with at least one white victim were 2.3 times more likely to result in a death sentence.

The role the race of the victim plays in North Carolina death penalty cases has been shown in previous studies, most recently in one released last month from researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Northeastern University in Boston. That study, covering 1980 to 2007, found that the odds of a death sentence for those convicted of killing whites are about three times higher than for those convicted of killing blacks.

The Michigan study breaks new ground through its detailed analysis of the process by which juries are impaneled in death-penalty cases here. Statewide, the researchers found, prosecutors in capital trials used peremptory strikes to exclude eligible blacks from juries at more than twice the rate than they excluded whites. More than 40 percent of the inmates on North Carolina's death row were sentenced to death by juries that included either one or no minorities.

O'Neill says that it's wrong to make a decision about whether someone lives or dies based on numbers. But the real wrong is for any hint of racial bias to be involved in the imposition of the ultimate punishment. What the Michigan researchers have produced is a lot more than a hint. Their findings are one more big reason that the death penalty should be officially halted in this state until we determine beyond all doubt that it can be administered fairly.