For Immediate Release: October 9, 2018
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-682-3983 or gretchen@cdpl.org or Paul Cates, 212-364-5346 or pcates@innocenceproject.org

WATCH THE VIDEO AND READ THE REPORT HERE

Durham, NC — Approximately three-quarters of the men and women on North Carolina’s death row were tried under obsolete laws, before the enactment of a slew of reforms designed to ensure fairness and prevent wrongful convictions, a new report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation has found.

North Carolina is home to the sixth largest death row in the nation with 142 prisoners. According to the report, Unequal Justice: How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row, 73 percent of the state’s death row prisoners were tried before 2001, when the first in a series of significant reforms took effect. Most of those condemned prisoners were sentenced in the 1990s, when starkly different death penalty laws and attitudes drove North Carolina to sentence between 25 and 35 people to death each year — and when harsh sentencing laws were creating a nationwide epidemic of mass incarceration.

The new report comes as North Carolina has just passed its 12^th year without an execution and is on track for another year with no new death sentences. Just one person has received a death sentence in the past four years.

“Today, we are living in a different world from when these men and women were sent to death row,” said Gretchen M. Engel, Executive Director at CDPL, a non-profit law firm that represents death row prisoners in North Carolina. “Public support for the death penalty is at a 50-year-low, and North Carolina has stopped executing people. Juries now see life without parole as a harsh and adequate punishment for the worst crimes. The fact is, if these people on death row had been tried under modern laws, most of them would be serving life without parole sentences instead of facing execution.”

The report’s findings show that out of 142 death row prisoners in North Carolina:

• 92% (131) were tried before a 2008 package of reforms intended to prevent false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications, which have been leading causes of wrongful convictions across the country. The new laws require interrogations and confessions to be recorded in homicide cases and set strict guidelines for eyewitness line-up procedures.
• 84% (119) were tried before a law granting defendants the right to see all the evidence in the prosecutor’s file — including information that might help reduce their sentence or prove their innocence.
• 73% (104) were sentenced before laws barring the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Despite a promise of relief for these less culpable defendants, disabled prisoners remain on death row.
• 73% (103) were sentenced before the creation of a statewide indigent defense agency that drastically improved the quality of representation for poor people facing the death penalty, and a law ending an unprecedented requirement that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in every aggravated first-degree murder. Before these changes, prosecutors did not have the ability to seek life sentences in these cases and poor people often received a sub-standard defense.

Many of the reforms came in response to a slew of exonerations both in North Carolina and around the country, which exposed an epidemic of innocent people on death row. Nine death sentenced men have now been exonerated in North Carolina. Most recently, North Carolina’s longest-serving death row inmate, Henry McCollum, proved his innocence with DNA evidence in September 2014.

The reforms outlined in the report were designed to prevent innocent people from being sentenced to death. For example, a reform requiring the recording of interrogations and confessions would have prevented Henry McCollum’s coerced confession, written for him by law enforcement, from being used to secure his conviction.

“Despite many important reforms, our capital punishment system still makes mistakes,” said Barry Scheck, Co-Director and Co-founder of the Innocence Project. “But during the years when most of North Carolina’s death row prisoners were sentenced, the system was absolutely stacked against poor people on trial for their lives. We’re talking about people whose defense attorneys came to court drunk, people who never saw evidence that might have proven their innocence, people who were convicted on the basis of a tainted eyewitness identification that would never be admissible in court today. They never had a chance at justice, and some of them might be innocent.”

For Immediate Release: March 2, 2018
For More Information Contact: ACLU Capital Punishment Project E.D. Cassandra Stubbs, 919-449-4885

Raleigh, NC – Today, the N.C. Supreme Court agreed to hear cases that will decide whether four defendants of color should remain on death row despite documented evidence of racial bias in their cases. The court accepted the cases of Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters – who were the first people to prove under the N.C. Racial Justice Act that racial discrimination helped secure their death sentences.

The justices will now receive briefs and hear oral arguments from both sides.  Lawyers for the four said the Supreme Court’s decision to grant review is an important step in a landmark civil rights case.

“I’ve had the honor of being involved in a number of civil rights milestones in North Carolina,” said attorney James Ferguson, a founding member, along with the late Julius Chambers, of the prominent law firm Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter. “In the 1960s, I was part of our state’s first racially-integrated law firm. We challenged school segregation and housing and employment discrimination, winning several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. I was there in 2013 when the governor pardoned the Wilmington 10, a group of civil rights activists who were wrongly convicted in the 1970s by a racially biased prosecution. These Racial Justice Act cases are every bit as important to our state’s progress on civil rights issues.”

In 2012, after listening to weeks of testimony and sorting through documents that spanned decades, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks found “a wealth of evidence showing the persistent, pervasive, and distorting role of race in jury selection throughout North Carolina.” Weeks said the defendants proved that prosecutors removed African Americans from jury service at double the rate they struck other potential jurors. The defendants also exposed bias in prosecutors’ own notes, training materials and testimony. For example, a Cumberland County prosecutor wrote notes such as “blk wino,” “thug,” and “black, high drug” to describe prospective jurors in a capital case.

Under the Racial Justice Act, Weeks removed all four prisoners from death row and sentenced them to life without parole. However, in 2015, the N.C. Supreme Court overturned Weeks’ decision, saying the hearings should be done over because the state wasn’t given enough time to prepare and that three of the defendants, who were tried together, should have their own separate hearings. The defendants were sent back to death row.

Then, in January 2017, Superior Court Judge Erwin Spainhour threw out all four cases without allowing a second hearing, saying the defendants could no longer use the Racial Justice Act because the legislature repealed it in 2013.  Now, the Supreme Court will decide whether Judge Spainhour’s decision to dismiss the defendants’ powerful evidence of race discrimination was correct.

These four defendants join two other death row prisoners, Rayford Burke and Andrew Ramseur, who are already on the court’s docket with a related claim. In those cases, the court will decide whether death row prisoners who filed Racial Justice Act claims but have not yet had hearings still have the right to present evidence of racial bias in court.

“All we want is for the courts to look at the facts and make a fair decision,” said Ferguson. “When you really look at the evidence, it’s clear that race is influencing how we use the death penalty in North Carolina. This is a chance for the state’s highest court to declare, definitively, that racial bias in the death penalty is an urgent civil rights issue that cannot be swept under the rug.”

For Immediate Release: January 24, 2018
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-956-9545

 

For Immediate Release: August 31, 2017
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel 919-956-9545 or Kristin Collins 919-791-7976
 
Raleigh, NC — This Saturday marks three years since the biggest exoneration in North Carolina history. Brothers Henry McCollum, who was North Carolina’s longest serving death row inmate, and Leon Brown were declared innocent in a Robeson County courtroom on Sept. 2, 2014.

On this anniversary, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, whose attorneys represented McCollum for two decades, have released a new report that tells the full story of the men’s wrongful conviction and exoneration. [Read the full report here.]

“Henry and Leon’s story has so many lessons to teach us,” said CDPL’s Executive Director Gretchen Engel. “It shows us the power that law enforcement and prosecutors have in our system, and how that power can be abused. It shows us how hard it is to uncover a wrongful conviction. It shows us that even cases we think are airtight can get the facts entirely wrong. ”

The report begins with McCollum and Brown’s arrest as vulnerable, intellectually disabled teenagers, and chronicles their trials, as well as the lucky break that led to their exoneration more than 30 years later. DNA testing on a cigarette butt left at the crime scene showed that the true culprit was a serial rapist who lived just feet from where 11-year-old Sabrina Buie’s body was found.

On the day of their exoneration, three years ago:

As the judge spoke the words that would set them free, Leon smiled broadly. But Henry dropped his head and closed his eyes, the heartbreak of the past 30 years etched into his sunken cheeks. In the back of the courtroom, Sabrina Buie’s family held each other and wept. Their daughter had been dead more than three decades, and justice was nowhere to be found.

“This case should be a warning to us of how easy it is to convict the wrong person and never figure out the truth,” Engel said. “Henry and Leon were freed because of a single cigarette butt. What if the killer hadn’t dropped it at the scene, or it had been lost during three decades in storage? They would still be in prison, and Henry might have been executed. Now, think about all the other cases on death row where there is no biological evidence.”

Biological evidence is available in the cases of less than a third of the 144 inmates on North Carolina’s death row. Three-quarters of death row inmates were tried more than 15 years ago, before a series of reforms designed to prevent the conviction of the innocent.

Nine months after their exoneration, McCollum and Brown received a rare pardon of innocence from the governor. The brothers have filed a civil lawsuit over their wrongful convictions, which remains pending.

For immediate release: March 6, 2017
For More Information Contact: Gerald Galloway, 910-639-0857

Wake jury chooses life without parole instead of death for seventh time in a row

Raleigh, NC – Last Friday, for the eighth time in a row, a Wake County jury rejected the death penalty. At the end of an eight-week trial for his life, Nathan Holden received a sentence of life with no possibility of parole.

It has been nearly a decade since Wake has sent anyone to death row. Now, public safety officials are coming forward to say the death penalty is a waste of resources in the fight against crime. In a new video from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a longtime North Carolina police chief and a high-ranking retired prison official who helped manage more than a dozen executions say they have serious concerns about the death penalty’s errors, ineffectiveness, and high cost.

“We spend so much time and money seeking death sentences in a tiny percentage of cases, and we have to ask ourselves, what are we getting for that investment?” said Gerald Galloway, a retired Southern Pines police chief who is now among the leaders of Public Safety Officials on the Death Penalty, a group of law enforcement and corrections officials from across the U.S. who are concerned about the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty.

“We have a broken system where innocent people are sometimes sentenced to death,” Galloway said. “We promise victims’ families ‘closure,’ and then the convicted sit on death row for decades, if they are executed at all. It only makes sense that juries are rejecting the death penalty. It no longer serves any useful public safety purpose.”

Seeking the death penalty at trial is a costly gamble for prosecutors. When defendants face the death penalty, they are entitled to two attorneys. A separate sentencing phase of the trial is required. And juries in capital cases must be “death qualified,” a process that removes all jurors who oppose the death penalty.

In an urban county like Wake, where people are increasingly skeptical of the death penalty, that process can extend the trial by weeks. In Holden’s case, it took more than five weeks to seat a jury.

According to N.C. Indigent Defense Services, the average capital case costs about four times as much as a non-capital first-degree murder case.

It has been more than a decade since North Carolina executed a prisoner. In the meantime, many who formerly supported the punishment have begun to speak out against it. In May 2016, former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr., who voted to affirm 185 death sentences, said he now believes the death penalty is unconstitutional.

Jennie Lancaster, a former Chief Deputy Secretary at the N.C. Department of Corrections, was part of a team managing 14 executions in North Carolina. She has consulted with N.C. Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, and says she does not believe the death penalty improves public safety. She says executions are hard on prison staff and that even the most violent offenders can be managed within prison walls.

“It is a fallacy to believe that the inmates who are on death row have committed the very worst crimes in some sort of hierarchy,” she says in the new video. “We have hundreds and thousands of inmates who have done the same thing. We manage them every day.”

Learn more at cdpl.org/safety.

For Immediate Release: December 21, 2016
For More Information Contact: Gretchen Engel, 919-956-9545 or Kristin Collins, 919-791-7976

State houses nation’s 6th largest death row, despite no executions and few new death sentences

Durham, NC — In 2016, North Carolina passed the decade mark without an execution, tried just five people capitally in all 100 counties, and of those five, sent only one person to death row. As another year ends, North Carolina continues to reflect national trends, which clearly show the death penalty on the decline.

Across the country, new death sentences in 2016 were at their lowest point in the modern era of the death penalty, which began in 1972. Only 20 people were executed in the U.S. this year, the fewest in 25 years. And a September poll from the Pew Research Center showed that in 2016, for the first time in four decades, a majority of Americans no longer support the death penalty. (More national statistics at DeathPenaltyInfo.org.)

“Look at Wake County, which used to send people to death row almost every year, but hasn’t had a new death sentence in almost a decade. This year, in the sixth case in a row, a Wake County jury chose a sentence of life without parole over the death penalty,” said Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “Society’s beliefs have shifted, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, people no longer think it’s appropriate.”

Over the past five years, an average of fewer than two people per year have been sent to death row in North Carolina, compared with 20 to 30 people per year in the 1990s. There were no new death sentences in 2012 and 2015. Yet, despite the death penalty’s fade, North Carolina continues to cling to one relic of the death penalty’s past.

With 150 men and women awaiting execution, North Carolina has the sixth largest death row in the nation. Three-quarters of N.C. death row inmates were convicted and sentenced at least 15 years ago, at a time when laws governing the death penalty were starkly different.

North Carolina now must maintain a death row where people live for decades. Two inmates died of natural causes this year, bringing the total to six in past five years. Almost half of N.C.’s death row inmates are now 50 or older, and 21 are 60 or older.

“Our death row is becoming a costly warehouse for the elderly,” Engel said. “And most of these people, if they had been tried under today’s laws, would never have been sentenced to death in the first place.”

In 2014, the exoneration of Henry McCollum, N.C.’s longest serving death row inmate showed just how unreliable decades-old convictions can be. Both McCollum and his brother, Leon Brown, were sentenced to death in 1983 based on false confessions that were written for them by law enforcement. McCollum and Brown did not benefit from modern laws designed to prevent false confessions, which now require all murder interrogations and confessions to be recorded.

One hundred twelve of North Carolina’s death row inmates were tried during an era when North Carolina was the only state in the nation that forced prosecutors to seek death sentences in every case of first-degree murder with an aggravating factor, regardless of other factors that might have called for mercy. Prosecutors could not agree to a sentence other than death even if, for example, the defendant played a minor role in the crime or was seriously mentally ill. This requirement led to unprecedented numbers of capital prosecutions and gave North Carolina one of the highest death sentencing rates in the nation during the 1990s. As soon as the requirement was dropped in 2001, death sentences plummeted.

The majority of death row inmates did not have the benefit of key reforms including the creation of a state agency to oversee indigent defense; a law granting defendants access to all the evidence in the prosecutor’s file, including evidence pointing to innocence; a bar on the execution of people with intellectual disabilities; and new strict guidelines for suspect lineups designed to prevent mistaken eyewitness identification.

In light of the unfairness in the system, even the staunchest defenders of the death penalty are now beginning to rethink their support for the punishment. As the former Republican Chief Justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, I. Beverly Lake, Jr. voted to affirm 185 death sentences, and 120 of those people remain on death row today. This May, he said he now believes the death penalty is unfair and unconstitutional.

Lake wrote in an op ed: “After spending years trying to instill confidence in the criminal justice system, I’ve come to realize that there are certain adverse economic conditions that have made the system fundamentally unfair for some defendants.”

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Watch our new video on racial bias in jury selection:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 23, 2016
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Ken Rose, Senior Attorney, 919-886-0350

U.S. Supreme Court ruling Will Force N.C. to Confront Racial Bias in Capital Cases
Decision in Georgia cases could compel new hearings on exclusion of blacks from juries

Durham, NC — A ruling today by the U.S. Supreme Court could give North Carolina death row inmates new avenues to challenge racial bias in capital trials and will force the state to confront discriminatory jury selection practices.

The Court ruled 7-1 today in a Georgia case, Foster v. Chatman, that prosecutors violated the Constitution by purposefully excluding African-Americans from the jury in a capital case, and that the Georgia courts erred by refusing to consider evidence proving that discrimination.

In the Georgia case, the prosecutor struck all four potential black jurors. While he gave the court “race-neutral” reasons for his strikes, the prosecutor’s notes showed that he highlighted the names of black jurors, marked them with a letter “B,” and put them first on his list of jurors to strike. The prosecution also ranked the African Americans in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.” Similar evidence of discrimination in jury selection has been uncovered in North Carolina.

“Today, the court sent a message that we must stop making excuses and start enforcing the law against discrimination in jury selection,” said Ken Rose, senior attorney at The Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “The privilege and obligation to serve on a jury, regardless of race, is fundamental to our democracy. Yet, African-Americans in North Carolina are routinely denied the right to participate in the most important decisions our criminal justice system ever makes.”

Lawyers who specialize in the death penalty say the ruling will give many death-sentenced men and women new rights to bring forward evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection at their own trials. Such evidence is usually barred if it is not introduced during the initial trial.

The ruling will also compel North Carolina courts to more vigorously enforce laws that prohibit race discrimination in jury selection. The N.C. Supreme Court has heard more than 100 cases where prosecutors were accused of intentionally striking minority jurors, but it has never found a prosecutor’s explanation for striking a black juror to be a cover for race discrimination, despite compelling evidence that the practice of excluding black jurors is prevalent.

“It has been illegal for three decades to exclude jurors based on race, but the reality is our courts have refused to enforce that law,” Rose said. “The U.S. Supreme Court said today that we cannot continue to ignore this blatant racism in our death penalty system.”

North Carolina tried to remedy the problem of discrimination in jury selection in 2009, with the passage of the N.C. Racial Justice Act, which allowed death row inmates to present statistical proof that African Americans were systematically excluded from their juries. Because of the Racial Justice Act, North Carolina death row inmates have uncovered even stronger evidence of discrimination in jury selection than in the Georgia case:

• In a Cumberland County case, defense attorneys discovered a prosecutor’s handwritten notes that labeled prospective jurors with terms like “blk wino” and “blk, high drug neighborhood.”
• In a Forsyth County case, prosecutors struck all but a single black juror. According to a handwritten note attached to that juror’s questionnaire, he was accepted because he attended a “multiracial” church, rather than a black one, and went to “predominantly white schools.”
• Several N.C. prosecutors were found to have attended a training, sponsored by the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, where they were given a cheat sheet of “race-neutral” excuses that they could use to justify their illegal strikes of black jurors.
• A comprehensive statewide study of capital cases from 1990-2010 found that prosecutors removed qualified black jurors from jury pools at more than twice the rate of white jurors. The disparity was even more pronounced when the defendant was black.

The evidence uncovered in North Carolina was compelling enough to be cited in legal briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Foster case.

The Racial Justice Act was repealed in 2013. More than 100 death row inmates who filed motions under the law are still pursuing their claims in court, but most have so far gone unheard.

“The Supreme Court today reaffirmed the importance of the evidence those defendants uncovered,” said Rose. “North Carolina courts must finally begin to take this critical issue seriously. The illegal practice of excluding African Americans from jury service must end.”

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For Immediate Release:
December 18, 2015

RALEIGH — Today, the N.C. Supreme Court ordered new hearings in four Racial Justice Act cases because of legal technicalities, but did not overturn the key findings of these groundbreaking cases: that African-Americans have been systematically excluded from serving on capital juries, producing unfair outcomes for defendants on trial for their lives.

The court said the state deserved more time to review the findings of a comprehensive statistical study presented by defendants, which looked at hundreds of capital cases from 1990-2010 and found that prosecutors used peremptory strikes to remove qualified black jurors at more than twice the rate of white jurors. In the second case, where three defendants’ claims were heard jointly, the court also said the three cases should have been heard separately.

The Supreme Court encouraged both sides to present additional statistical studies. The decision will keep executions on hold indefinitely in North Carolina, where the courts have stayed all executions until Racial Justice Act litigation is resolved.

“We are confident that, no matter how many hearings are held or studies completed, we will win this case. The evidence of racial bias in jury selection is simply overwhelming and undeniable,” said Jay Ferguson, attorney for the defendants. “All this decision will do is add more delays and cost the state millions to conduct new studies and hold new hearings. We will be throwing more taxpayer money into a hopelessly broken death penalty.”

The four defendants whose cases were decided today — Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters, and Tilmon Golphin — were all removed from death row and resentenced to life without parole by Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks in 2012. Weeks wrote in his ruling that he found “a wealth of evidence showing the persistent, pervasive, and distorting role of race in jury selection throughout North Carolina.”

“The powerful evidence that Judge Weeks found still stands,” said Ferguson. “Nothing the Supreme Court did today challenges that in any way. As a state, we cannot ignore this troubling evidence that racial bias infects the death penalty from the very beginning of the process. When we cannot even choose the jury fairly, we surely cannot ensure fair trials and outcomes for defendants facing execution.”