North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, the most far-reaching effort nationwide to attempt to deal with the troubling question of race in the application of the death penalty, will face its first court challenge this month in Forsyth County. We believe it will pass this test.
Judge William Z. Wood of Forsyth Superior Court has set a hearing to start next week on motions filed in two local death cases being appealed under the act — Carl Stephen Moseley and Errol Duke Moses.
At a hearing last week that attracted death-penalty opponents and proponents, including prosecutors from around the state, Wood agreed to hear further arguments from both sides. Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill will challenge the Racial Justice Act on behalf of the state as unconstitutionally broad and vague. O'Neill has said he thinks the law was created to do away with the death penalty.
The new Republican-led legislature also opposes the Racial Justice Act, and GOP leaders have said they might attempt to repeal it during this year's session.
The law, originally introduced by Reps. Larry Womble and Earline Parmon of Winston-Salem and signed in 2009 by Gov. Bev. Perdue, gives death-row inmates and defendants facing the death penalty the right to use statistics and evidence to show that race was a "significant factor" in their sentence or in the prosecutor's decision to pursue the death penalty. About 95 percent of the 158 inmates on death row have filed motions under the Racial Justice Act. Appeals can be based on the race of the victim, the race of the accused or the racial makeup of the jury. Those who succeed might have their sentences reduced to life without parole but cannot be released from prison.
The act drew on two Michigan State University College of Law studies. They showed that statistically those who kill white people in North Carolina are 2.6 times more likely to be executed than those who kill minorities. In Forsyth County, 58 percent of death-row inmates were sentenced by juries with only one or no people of color, compared with 40 percent statewide. And Forsyth County had more blacks — seven — on death row than any other county. The studies looked at 1,500 cases from 1990 to 2009.
Wood wants to hear more information about the Michigan studies next week.
We understand the prosecutors' umbrage at the notion of the Racial Justice Act, which they think implies they are racist. But the evidence of unfairness in the application of the death penalty in North Carolina, intentional or otherwise, racial or otherwise, is more compelling and demands scrutiny. The nation is watching.
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