This week: Racial Justice Act testimony to reveal connections between racial terrorism & the modern death penalty

March 4, 2024 By Kristin Collins

For more information contact:
Gretchen M. Engel, gretchen@cdpl.org, (919) 682-3983

Smithfield, NC — The Racial Justice Act hearing of Hasson Bacote continues this week in Johnston County with groundbreaking evidence connecting the modern death penalty to North Carolina’s history of racial violence and discriminatory law enforcement. Expert witnesses will include historians, social scientists, and Bryan Stevenson, a capital defense attorney who founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and authored the book Just Mercy.

“It is hard to overstate the significance of what’s happening in Johnston County right now,” said CDPL Executive Director Gretchen M. Engel. “Typically, we look at death penalty cases one by one, focusing only on the facts of a single case. The Racial Justice Act has given us the rare chance to step back and see the full picture. When we do that, it is shockingly clear that our state’s history of racial violence did not simply disappear; it transformed into the modern death penalty.”

Bacote is represented by CDPL, the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, and North Carolina attorney Jay Ferguson.

Bacote was convicted in Johnston County, where racism has been openly displayed. Billboards promoting the Ku Klux Klan stood at the entrances to the county until the mid-1970s, and Klan activity was documented in the county until the 1990s. Horrific incidents of racist policing have gone unaddressed. Still today, the county has never elected a Black county commissioner, and a sheriff who made openly racist statements in the News & Observer remains in office.

In 1977, Johnston County was home to North Carolina’s first capital prosecution under the state’s modern death penalty statute. In that very first case, a judge found that Black people were illegally excluded from the grand jury that indicted the two Black defendants, who were on trial for the killings of two white men. The same problems persist today.

On Monday, Dr. Crystal Sanders, a Johnston County native and professor of African American studies at Emory University, will present a detailed county history (available here) that includes:

The 1998 wrongful conviction of 16-year-old Terence Garner, which Johnston County officials refused to overturn even after another man confessed. Garner was finally freed in 2002, after a national outcry.
The 1986 police killing of Ellis King Jr., a Black man who called police to report a theft. No officers were punished for shooting King in the back of the head while he was restrained face-down on his parents’ front lawn.
Housing segregation enforced by threats, violence and cross burnings through at least the 1980s.
Sustained Black voter suppression that has led to only a single Black person ever being elected to countywide office.
A history of lynchings attended by thousands of people, many of whom wielded power in the legal system until the modern day.

On Wednesday, Bryan Stevenson will testify about the links between modern jury discrimination and a history of excluding Black people from juries. Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative has documented how racially skewed juries lead to wrongful convictions and disproportionate sentences for people of color.

Other experts who will testify this week include Dr. Seth Kotch, a professor in UNC’s Department of American Studies who has documented the link between lynching and the death penalty, and Dr. Sam Sommers, a social psychologist at Tufts University who studies the effect of implicit bias on decision-making, including in jury selection.

Defense attorneys will also question Greg Butler, the prosecutor who tried Bacote. Statistical analysis found that Butler struck Black jurors from capital trials at more than ten times the rate of white jurors. He referred to Bacote as a “thug” and compared other Black defendants to “predators of the African plain.”

“When you take in the full scope of history, the question becomes obvious: How could we ever trust this system — which continues to be carried out almost exclusively by white authorities in places with stark records of racial terror — to fairly decide whether a Black man should live or die?” Engel said. “If we do not reckon with our history, North Carolina will continue to carry out racist death sentences.”

Testimony begins at 10 a.m. Monday and 9:30 on subsequent days in Courtroom 2 of the Johnston County Courthouse. It will also be livestreamed on WRAL.com.

Another innocent client goes home

February 29, 2024 By Kristin Collins

On Wednesday, in the middle of a historic Racial Justice Act hearing in Johnston County, CDPL Executive Director Gretchen Engel snuck away to Philadelphia. Her reason? The exoneration of a client who spent nearly 30 years on Pennsylvania’s death row.

Here she is with Danny Gwynn, along with other supporters and members of the legal team.

Mr. Gwynn was wrongfully sentenced to death in 1995 for an act of arson that killed one person. District Attorney Larry Krasner agreed to Mr. Gwynn’s release and acknowledged that prosecutors had relied on a false confession that was inconsistent with the facts of the crime. They also suppressed evidence of another suspect, who they now believe set the deadly fire.

While most of CDPL’s clients are in North Carolina, every once in a while our attorneys take an out-of-state case. Death row exonerations are always a cause for celebration, but it’s also tragic that CDPL has now had four clients exonerated after being sentenced to death. Stunningly, Mr. Gwynn is the second CDPL client who spent three decades awaiting execution before his innocence was finally recognized. (The first was Henry McCollum.)

A death penalty system that leaves innocent people at risk of execution is clearly unfit to exist, and we continue to find it amazing that people survive decades of wrongful imprisonment with their spirits intact. As Gretchen says, “Danny is an incredibly resilient person. His art work, which you can view here, has been sustaining for him and a gift to everyone who sees it.” On Wednesday night, Gretchen was by his side as he walked out of prison and reunited with his family.

In one week, we’ve seen the starkest proof imaginable that the death penalty is racist and error-prone — the very opposite of justice. And we’re not done yet. The Racial Justice Act hearing in the case of Hasson Bacote continues next week. On Monday, we’ll have several historians who will expose the death penalty’s clear links to racial terror, and on Wednesday we expect Bryan Stevenson to testify about the longstanding exclusion of Black people from juries. It will be livestreamed on WRAL.com or you can join us in Courtroom 2 on the second floor of the Johnston County Courthouse. Court begins at 10 a.m. Monday and 9:30 a.m. the rest of the week.

For now, enjoy the sight of Danny Gwynn taking his first steps outside of prison.

The Case Of Hasson Bacote

February 21, 2024 By Kristin Collins

Landmark Racial Justice Act hearing could affect more than 100 people on NC’s death row

Hasson Bacote in a recent photo taken at Central Prison in Raleigh

Hasson Bacote was sentenced to death in a Johnston County courtroom in April 2009. As a Black man in a deeply segregated county with a history of racial terror, Bacote’s fate was all but sealed well before the jury issued his death sentence. Under our current death penalty statute, every one of the eight Black capital defendants who have faced Johnston County juries has received a death sentence. Bacote was no exception. Now, his case is moving forward under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), which allows capital defendants to challenge their death sentences on the basis that race was a significant factor in decisions to seek or impose the death penalty. A hearing will begin Feb. 26 in Johnston County Superior Court and force those watching to grapple with the stark reality that race plays an outsized role in the administration of the death penalty.

Bacote’s will be the first RJA case heard since 2020, when the N.C. Supreme Court ruled that, despite the Act’s 2013 repeal, all claims brought under the RJA remain valid. His case will decide key questions about the scope and application of the Act and pave the way for others on North Carolina’s death row. Bacote will be the first defendant to present a trove of social science and historical evidence linking the death sentences of Black men to a pattern of racial terror and intimidation. Bacote will also present powerful statistical evidence of discrimination in the death penalty.

Bacote was just 21 when he was charged with the crime that led to his death sentence, the shooting of 18-year-old Anthony Surles during a robbery. The crime was the culmination of a childhood marked by poverty, trauma, and neglect. After surviving a traumatic birth and prolonged hospital stay as a newborn, Bacote was abandoned by his parents at an early age. At seven years old, after witnessing his maternal aunt die, Bacote entered foster care where he was subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Later, he was separated from his older brother, the only stable figure in his life. All of these are reasons why juries often choose life over death. But in the rural eastern North Carolina courtroom where the judge and every lawyer was white — and where the prosecutor struck qualified Black jurors at three times the rate of whites, creating a heavily white jury from a diverse jury pool – Bacote received no mercy.

Nor did it matter that—as even the prosecution conceded—there was no evidence that the murder of Surles was premeditated or deliberate. The prosecution charged Bacote and a codefendant, Jeff Evans, with attempting to rob five young adults, including Surles, in a trailer. Witnesses testified that Anthony Surles fled the trailer during the robbery and Bacote fired a single shot in his direction. None of the witnesses nor Bacote realized Surles had been shot until they went outside and found him collapsed on the ground. Ten white and two Black jurors convicted Bacote of felony murder and sentenced him to death. Felony murder is a legal doctrine that holds defendants responsible for deaths that occur during the course of committing other violent felonies. In some states, felony murders are not eligible for the death penalty. Bacote is one of just 11 people sentenced to death in North Carolina for a crime that involved no planning or forethought. All 11 are men of color and one was Henry McCollum, who was exonerated after spending more than 30 years on death row. Bacote is the only person for whom the prosecution did not at least seek a conviction for something other than felony murder in a capital case.

In February 2024, Bacote will present statistical evidence of racial disparities in the prosecutor’s use of peremptory strikes in capital cases in North Carolina and in Johnston County, as well as racial disparities in capital sentencing in Johnston County. This type of proof – while key to rooting out racism in the criminal punishment system – is not typically considered in criminal cases. However, the 2009 RJA allowed people on death row to present evidence of systemic bias that infected their sentences. North Carolina’s RJA was the first statute of its kind to allow a person’s death sentence to be vacated without requiring proof of intentional discrimination. As a result of the law, studies uncovered statewide patterns of enormous racial disparities in jury selection and sentencing. Two prior RJA hearings were held under the statute in 2012, resulting in life sentences for four defendants based on the trial court’s finding of statewide discrimination. Those prior decisions were ultimately vacated, meaning that Bacote’s case could be the first RJA case with precedential effect.

Among those who will provide expert witness testimony is attorney Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL, who will attest to the history of racial discrimination in jury selection, as well as evidence of racial bias in Johnston County courtrooms and Bacote’s own case. Social psychologist Dr. Samuel Sommers will explain how implicit racial biases are measurable and affect everything from jury selection to jury deliberations.

Historical experts Dr. Crystal Sanders, a historian born and raised in Johnston County, and Dr. Seth Kotch will detail the racist history of Johnston County and North Carolina as a whole. Johnston County was the site of at least six lynchings between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of World War I. Through the 1970s, KKK billboards greeted drivers with messages like, “Welcome to Klan country. Love it or leave it.” In the 1980s, Smithfield police officers shot and killed a Black man after he called to report the theft of his family’s television. The officer who fired the shot went on to become a state capitol police officer and a Johnston County magistrate. Today, the county remains deeply segregated. Though Black residents make up 19 percent of the population, the county has never elected a Black sheriff, district attorney, or county commissioner. The current sheriff has publicly voiced anti-immigrant slurs and remained in office with no challengers. Recently, county commissioners withheld millions in funding from the public schools until they adopted a policy that teachers can be fired if they teach about systemic racism.

The ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund represents Bacote. Attorneys expect the hearing to last two to three weeks.

Statement on the NC Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Tucker

December 15, 2023 By Kristin Collins

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2023

Statement from Center for Death Penalty Litigation board member & capital defense attorney Henderson Hill regarding today’s North Carolina Supreme Court decision in State v. Russell William Tucker:

“For most of its history, North Carolina has utterly failed to ensure that all citizens have the right to serve on juries, regardless of their race. It took until 2022 for our state supreme court to finally strike down a single criminal conviction due to the exclusion of Black jurors. That historic decision gave many of us hope that our state was finally ready to tackle the persistent problem of people of color being denied a voice in our courtrooms. However, it’s clear from today’s ruling that North Carolina’s highest court has gone backward once again.

“Even in cases where a defendant faces execution, the court appears determined to blind itself to glaring evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection. Russell Tucker, a Black man, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury because prosecutors methodically and intentionally removed every potential Black juror. I am deeply disappointed that our supreme court has chosen to ignore the evidence and allow a racist death sentence to stand.”

Read the court’s decision here. Read more about Mr. Tucker’s case here.

In the face of racist death sentences & overwhelming odds, we keep fighting

December 14, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Usually, CDPL prefers to write about its successes. But today, we’re sharing another part of the reality of capital defense work. This is a heartfelt letter written by CDPL’s executive director, Gretchen Engel, just after receiving the news that her client, Frank Chambers, had lost his most recent appeal.

Dear Friends,

I wanted to send you a different letter today. I wanted to tell you that CDPL client Frank Chambers won a new trial after nearly 30 years on North Carolina’s death row. I wanted to tell you that, at long last, a court recognized the exceedingly clear evidence that Black people were systematically and intentionally excluded from Mr. Chambers’ jury. Instead, I have to tell you that a judge looked at that evidence and chose to ignore it. Once again, I am confronted with the hard truth that North Carolina’s courts are often unwilling and unable to address racism in death penalty cases.

At Mr. Chambers’ 1994 trial, prosecutors used peremptory strikes to exclude six out of nine Black citizens who appeared for jury service. They subjected prospective Black jurors to racist questions, such as whether they would be criticized by their “Black friends” if they voted to convict a person of their own race. And in their private notes, prosecutors made clear that race mattered by labeling the race and gender of Black potential jurors. Here are just a few examples:

There were no comparable notes about white potential jurors. In the end, only one Black person served on Mr. Chambers’ jury.

As his lawyer, I am devastated on two levels. First, that this blatant discrimination happened to begin with. Second, that all these years later, a court has said it makes no difference whether Black citizens are denied their constitutional right to serve on a jury. It makes no difference whether my Black client got a fair trial and jury of his peers. Even when there is overwhelming evidence of racial discrimination, the state should be allowed to carry out the most extreme sentence imaginable.

The only thing that gives me hope today is Frank himself. Just after receiving the news that he had lost, he tried to comfort and encourage his legal team. Frank has lived half his life on death row. He told us he was not giving up and neither should we.

So that’s the message I’m going to leave you with today. Our clients on death row face overwhelming odds, yet they go on believing that justice is possible. As long as CDPL is here, we will continue fighting for them. Today was a hard day, but we are not giving up.

Sincerely,
Gretchen M. Engel

Responding to Violence with Care

November 29, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Originally posted on Revaluing Care

I recently attended a conference where a presenter asked us to imagine a place where we feel safe. People began to call out visions of cozy beds, fireplaces, and family dinners. She asked us to think more broadly, and people talked about access to healthcare, clean water, and good schools. Not a single person envisioned a prison, a police officer, or an execution chamber — even though most Americans are taught to believe they are the keys to our safety.

Every human being wants and deserves safety. But the question is: What makes us safe? In the United States, we’ve mostly chosen to spend our public safety budgets on arresting, incarcerating and executing people we deem criminals. We have the second largest prison population in the world behind China, with nearly 2 million people behind bars — including almost 50,000 children. We are one of only a handful of developed countries that continue to use the death penalty.

How different might our society look if public safety could be reimagined as caring for people and communities?

I work at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which represents people facing the death penalty in North Carolina. Let me tell you about one of the 138 people on North Carolina’s death row. Nathan, like most people on death row, grew up in crushing poverty in a neighborhood where violence and trauma were everyday occurrences. His mother struggled with addiction, and he barely knew his father. He often went hungry. He entered foster care at 12 and spent most of his teen years in a boy’s home where children were physically and sexually abused. At 20, he committed a shooting fueled by family loyalty and the kind of street justice that was the norm in his world. He has spent the past 30 years on death row.

Now imagine a world where Nathan, his family, and his community received the care they needed. Imagine if violence in Nathan’s neighborhood had been treated as a public health issue. Imagine if leaders had sought data-driven solutions to gun violence and child poverty, rather than pursuing punishment-based policies rooted in a desire for revenge. Imagine neighborhood task forces dedicated to peaceful resolution of conflicts, treatment of at-risk people, and the mobilization of communities to solve their own problems. Imagine job training and youth programs. Imagine neighborhoods with equal access to high quality schools, healthcare, housing, and food.

Instead of investing in Nathan as a child, our country has invested untold sums in prosecuting, incarcerating, and litigating his appeals. If he is eventually strapped down and executed, what will have been gained? Who will be safer?

We can probably all agree that violence prevention is preferable to punishing crime after it happens. But even an ideal society, violence will still exist. It’s a fact of human existence. You may be wondering, how do we deal with crime once it happens? Do we let criminals off scot-free?

Again, I ask you to shift your perspective from punishment to care, because if we could punish our way out of violence, the United States would be the safest place on the planet. Restorative justice is a process that can bring all parties together to understand why the crime happened and how best to facilitate healing. Survivors decide what they need to heal, and those who have caused harm take accountability and learn the impact of their actions. Some of the most effective restorative justice programs have been built in communities facing the most violence, and in Durham, the process was recently used to resolve a homicide case.

I’ve visited Nathan on death row many times, and the person I’ve met is kind, bright and funny. He has thought deeply and taken responsibility for his actions. He has spent decades wishing he could offer something to the families of the victims, but in our carceral system, there is no way for the two sides to communicate.

As a country, we need to start asking not just how to punish violence, but how to prevent it and how to heal it. The answers all start with taking care of people.

Take Action: Do you live in North Carolina? On Dec. 2 in Raleigh, we will gather to ask Gov. Cooper to commute North Carolina’s death sentences to prison terms. Please join us and help spread the word. Learn more and register here.

Read More: A beautiful essay from death row prisoner Paul Brown about an example of caring on death row.

Watch CDPL’s 2023 Osborn Awards

October 3, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Photos by Matt Ramey

Photos by Matt Ramey

We had the largest crowd ever at our awards celebration on Sept. 26 at Parizade. It was wonderful to honor a group of people who have done such important work — and bittersweet to remember our friend Bill Massengale in the company of his beautiful family. We also cherished being in community with people who care so deeply about ending the barbaric death penalty. The entire staff of CDPL felt loved and supported. We were especially thrilled to have among us three exonerees from North Carolina’s death row, Mike Ryan, Ed Chapman, and Alfred Rivera, along with April Barber, who was recently pardoned after spending decades in prison for crimes committed as a child.

Congratulations again to Bill Massengale and Marilyn Ozer, winners of the Osborn Award, and Patricia Carrington, winner of the Messenger of Light Award. Read more about them here.

You can watch the speeches, and hear a beautiful letter written by a man on death row, here:

Video by Random Gott

Thanks also to our generous sponsors, who make CDPL’s work possible.

Benefactors ($2,000)

Akin Adepoju
Gerry Dudzik & Cindy Elliott
Jay & Kay Ferguson

Champions ($1,000)

Brandon Garrett & Kerry Abrams
Huggins & Zuiker, LLP
Robert Mosteller & Elizabeth Gibson
Marcia H. Morey
David Neal & Jennifer Weaver
Sallenger Law, LLP
Douglas A. Smith, PLLC
Faith Spencer & Mark Parts
Racial Equity Institute

Defenders ($500)

Terrica Redfield Ganzy & David Ebert
Tye & Wanda Hunter
Jin Hin Lee
Ann McKown & Dan Hudgins
Christine Mumma
Ken Rose & Beth Silberman
Andrew DeSimone & Lucy Schenkman
Thomas, Ferguson & Beskind, LLP
David S. Tuttle

Advocates ($250)

Cindy Adcock and Pat McCoy
Alexander Law, PLLC
Terry & Jenny Alford
Jack & Jennifer Boger
David B. Botchin
Moira Downey & Christopher Brook
Ken & Margie Broun
Signe & Eugene Brown
Jay Bryan
Lisa Dubs & Steve Ehlers
Cait Fenhagen & John Carlson
Fialko Law PLLC
Steve & Pam Freedman
Teresa M. Gibson
Dionne Gonder-Stanley
Jaclyn Gonzalez
Elaine Gordon & Robert Hurley
Sandra Hagood
Pricey Harrison
Henderson & Renee Hill
Hynson Law, PLLC
Staples Hughes
Bo King
Mansfield Law Firm, PLLC
Michael McCullough
David Mills & Leila Keen
Janet Moore
Tonya Morgan
Teresa L. Norris
NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
Elspeth Ohman
Kristin Parks
Mark Rabil
Richard Rosen
Lao Rubert & Steve Schewel
Susan Seehusen
William & Susan Simpson
Robert & Jessica Singagliese
Helen & Fred Spielman
Karen Stegman
Gerda Stein
Kim Stevens & Tonya Maxwell
Deonte & Elizabeth Thomas
Robert Trenkle & Nancy Hilburn
Amos Tyndall
Kathryn VandenBerg
Linda Weisel & Daniel Pollitt
David Weiss
Willingham Law, PLLC

Help us celebrate this year’s Osborn & Messenger of Light Award winners

August 1, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Please join CDPL on Tuesday, Sept. 26 to honor some of the most talented and steadfast people in our fight against the death penalty. We will celebrate the contributions of two extraordinary capital defense attorneys, Marilyn Ozer and the late Bill Massengale, the 2023 winners of the Osborn Award. We will also honor Patricia Carrington for her many years of service at Central Prison’s Visitation Department. Officer Carrington will receive the Messenger of Light Award. Read about our award winners here.

We will also have a very special guest, best-selling novelist and lawyer, John Grisham!

The event will be from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Durham’s Parizade. Wine, heavy hors d’oeuvres, and dessert will be served. Other drinks are available for purchase.

Please consider sponsoring our event this year. In addition to supporting our work, your gift permits CDPL to offer discounted tickets to guests who might not otherwise be able to attend – exonerees, people who’ve recently come home after time in prison, family members of our awardees, and newer members of our community. Please choose one of these sponsorship levels:

Benefactor — $2,000 (includes 5 tickets)
Champion — $1,000 (includes 4 tickets)
Defender — $500 (includes 3 tickets)
Advocate — $250 (includes 2 tickets)

Sponsors at the Benefactor, Champion, and Defender levels will have an opportunity to meet personally with John Grisham and our awardees and even take photos!

Please note: To avoid excessive fees, we have chosen not to allow credit card payments through the registration site. If you’d like to pay by credit card, please register first and then go to our Donate page to make your payment.

Meet Our Special Guest: John Grisham

John Grisham is the author of forty-seven bestselling books, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include The Judge’s List, Sooley, and his third Jake Brigance novel, A Time for Mercy, which is being developed by HBO as a limited series.

Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.

When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.

John lives on a farm in central Virginia.

Meet CDPL’s 2023 award winners

August 1, 2023 By Kristin Collins

Each year, we give an award in honor of J. Kirk Osborn, one of the giants of North Carolina’s capital defense community, whose advocacy and deep compassion for his clients saved many lives and inspired other attorneys to follow in his footsteps. We also give the Messenger of Light Award to people who make significant contributions to our work and our clients.

The J. Kirk Osborn Award: Marilyn Ozer and Bill Massengale

The winners of the 2023 J. Kirk Osborn Award for outstanding leadership in capital defense are the extraordinarily deserving duo of Marilyn Ozer and Bill Massengale. Marilyn and Bill were longtime law partners who saved many people from execution, freed a client who had been sentenced to death based on extremely questionable evidence, and worked to address racism in their home town of Chapel Hill. Their partnership lasted until Bill’s death in December. His family will accept his award posthumously.

Over three decades of working on capital cases, Bill and Marilyn were on the front lines of the fight against North Carolina’s death penalty. They endured the heartbreaking executions of two clients, William “Bugs” Powell and Ronnie Frye. Mr. Frye’s case was particularly painful, since his trial lawyer drank through the trial and never presented evidence that could have swayed the jury to vote for life. Bill and Marilyn dug up compelling evidence that jurors never heard, including a photograph of Mr. Frye when he was a bruised and battered nine-year-old child. Local law enforcement authorities had used the photo to train staff in recognizing signs of child abuse. Tragically, during North Carolina’s decades of rapid-fire executions, the courts shrugged their shoulders.

However, during those same years, Bill and Marilyn also saw many successes that saved the lives of clients who might otherwise have been executed. In 1993, they won a remand from the US Supreme Court in the case of Marvin Williams. Ultimately, Mr. Williams’ life was spared because of his intellectual disability. Mr. Williams never forgot Bill and Marilyn and regularly sent them beautiful artwork he had created. Numerous other clients were either removed from death row or avoided death sentences thanks to Bill and Marilyn’s expert case work and knack for building trust with their clients.

More recently, they represented Mike Ryan, who spent seven years on death row after being convicted based on falsified DNA evidence. Because of Bill and Marilyn’s dogged investigation into both the flawed DNA evidence and the bullying of several alibi witnesses, Mr. Ryan was granted a new trial in 2017. However, the State appealed, and Marilyn successfully argued the case in the NC Supreme Court in 2019. Finally, in March of this year, the prosecutor agreed to settle the case for second-degree murder and a sentence very close to time served. Mr. Ryan was freed in May and is living in Florida with his fiancee.

Bill and Marilyn were also involved in suing the Chapel Hill Police Department for the racist 1990 “Readi-Rock” raid in which dozens of law-abiding Black club patrons were illegally searched and arrested by police wearing black masks and camouflage. Many in the club believed they were being robbed by vigilantes. Shortly before Bill’s death, the town of Chapel Hill formally apologized for the raid.

Through all their years of practice, Bill and Marilyn’s empathy for their clients was boundless. They remained good-humored and relentless in their fight for justice. Marilyn continues to represent clients facing the death penalty and serves as a consultant to capital trial lawyers throughout the state.

The Messenger of Light Award: Patricia Carrington

Patricia Carrington retired in June after 25 years as a correctional officer at Central Prison. During her more than two decades of service, she became known as a beacon of compassion and kindness, both to the people inside and to the many people who passed through the prison’s gates. She is the winner of CDPL’s Messenger of Light Award.

Ms. Carrington was hired at Central Prison in 1998, and her first assignment landed her in the Segregation Unit, where prisoners deemed too difficult for general population are kept in solitary confinement. From the beginning, her philosophy was simple: “You give respect, you get respect.” She believed in doing her job with integrity, but her job was not to judge or to punish.

She worked in virtually every part of the prison, from supervising the dining hall to accompanying residents on their visits to hospitals. Rather than standing aloof and afraid in a corner, she chatted and joked with people. As one incarcerated person described it, “You treat us like we’re human.”

She developed a special bond with many of the people on death row. She came to believe that anyone in their circumstances might have ended up in the same position. “I realized a lot of the people there could’ve been my son or my husband, so you want to treat them like you’d want an officer to treat your family.”

In 2001, she was assigned to the prison’s visitation unit and became a fixture not just for the people receiving visits, but for the families and legal teams who came to see them. Lawyers and investigators knew her as the first face to greet them, treating them with both professionalism and a personal touch. Families knew her as the person who would bring an elderly visitor a chair or offer words of advice and consolation after a difficult visit.

She watched parents age and children grow into adults. She remembers one couple who traveled a long distance every week to visit their son on death row. As the years passed, the father developed Alzheimers and became too sickly to visit. Then, the mother’s visits became irregular and finally stopped. “I saw how much of a toll it had taken on her over the years. Not only were these guys serving time, their families were too.”

Ms. Carrington also had to witness the heartbreak of executions. A visitation officer was assigned to remain on duty late into the night to admit families and legal teams for their final visits. She watched through glass as parents were allowed to hug their child for the first time in decades, knowing it would also be the last time.

When she started at Central Prison, she believed that anyone on death row deserved to be there. But her views changed during 25 years on the job, as she saw dozens of death sentences overturned because of mistakes or falsified evidence. She was there when Alan Gell was exonerated in 2004 and again when Henry McCollum walked free in 2014. It had taken him more than 30 years to prove his innocence. “You stop and you think, how many innocent people were put on death row that should have never been? How many were actually executed?”

Ms. Carrington said that, when she first applied for a job at Central Prison, she thought of it as a joke. She figured she had no chance of being hired. “I never thought I would work in a prison, but the experience and the understanding I gained, I would not trade it for anything in the world.” Ms. Carrington is a teacher for all of us on how to remain human even in the most inhumane of places.

Ending the death penalty makes us all more free

March 23, 2023 By Kristin Collins

In March, our director of public information, Kristin Collins, was asked to give a sermon about the death penalty at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, where she is a member. She told a very personal story of how she learned the truth about our state’s deeply racist criminal punishment system and made a compelling argument for why every North Carolinian should join the grassroots movement to end the death penalty. It was a good reminder that, as Kristin said, “Whether we accept or reject the death penalty is not about what happens to other people. It’s about who we are and the kind of world we want to live in.”

We hope you’ll take the time to watch Kristin’s talk, which lasts about ten minutes. It is followed by a very moving sermon by our friend Andre Smith, who told the story of losing his son to murder and then committing his life to ending the death penalty and working with men in prison, helping them turn their lives around. Once you’ve listened, I hope you will be inspired to get more involved in the growing grassroots effort to ask Gov. Cooper to commute North Carolina’s death sentences to prison terms.

Kristin describes it this way:

I can tell you from personal experience that we’re building a joyful movement of people who believe a better world is possible. And whether or not we convince North Carolina’s politicians to abolish the death penalty, I know that being part of this work has allowed me to become a little more free. It has allowed me to let go of that old punishment mindset and see that most of the things wrong in the world are better solved with love and compassion. It has allowed me to be a little less quick to judge — and to recognize that we all have the potential to do harm and to repair.

Learn more about the campaign and how to get involved here.

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