North Carolina should repeal the death penalty because it is expensive, ineffective and racially biased, an Appalachian State University professor says in a new study.
The study was done by Matthew Robinson, a professor of government and justice studies. Robinson analyzed data from more than 20 studies on the death penalty and released his findings Monday at a news conference in Raleigh.
"In the past six years, three states have abolished the death penalty: Illinois, New Mexico and New Jersey," Robinson said in an interview after the news conference. "They did it for the same reason. They found racial bias, they found it to be costly, they found it to be ineffective and a threat to innocent people."
Robinson said the studies he looked at were remarkably consistent in their conclusions — that the death penalty doesn't deter crime, is racially biased and has led to people being wrongfully convicted.
Robinson's study comes two weeks after Republicans filed a bill in the state House that would effectively nullify the Racial Justice Act that was signed into law in 2009. The law allows a death row inmate or a defendant facing the death penalty to use statistics and other evidence to prove that racial bias was a "significant factor" in his sentence or in prosecutors' decision to pursue the death penalty.
The only remedy under the law is for a defendant's sentence to be reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The proposed legislation, House Bill 615, would disallow the use of statewide statistics and require a defendant to prove in his specific case that there was "discriminatory purpose" in seeking or imposing the death penalty.
According to Robinson's study, North Carolina's use of the death penalty has been declining since 2000, with an average of three people a year being sentenced to death. No one has been executed since 2006.
The death penalty also doesn't deter crime, the study says. Robinson said data show the state's murder rate declining since executions stopped in 2006 and that no study has ever shown North Carolina's death penalty to have any deterrent effect.
Studies, Robinson said, have shown that death penalty cases in North Carolina cost an additional $11 million to $20 million a year.
There's also significant racial bias, Robinson said. Numerous studies have concluded that those who kill whites are far more likely to get the death penalty than those who kill blacks, the study said. Nearly 80 percent of death sentences imposed in the state are in cases where the victim was white, according to the study.
Robinson also said in the study that seven people have been exonerated and removed from death row since 1973, giving the state the seventh-highest error rate in the country. Six of the seven people exonerated were minorities and all seven were sentenced to death for killing whites, the study says.
Statewide, the study says, two out of three death sentences are overturned on appeal.
Forsyth County has been aggressive in pursuing the death penalty, sending more people to death row than any other county in the state.
Jim O'Neill, the district attorney for Forsyth County, said the study doesn't take into account the pain and suffering of the murder victims and fails to examine the heinous nature of the crimes.
Some families don't want prosecutors to pursue the death penalty, O'Neill said. He also makes sure families know that because of appeals, it often takes a long time before someone is executed, he said.
But he said it is important to keep the death penalty as an option to reserve for the worst murders.
"As a result of dozens of murder cases I have prosecuted, I have come to believe that some people are so evil that death is the only appropriate punishment for them," he said.
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