NEW VOICES: Former Chief Justice of North Carolina Supreme Court Questions Constitutionality of Death Penalty

I. Beverly Lake, Jr. — a staunch sup­port­er of North Carolina​’s death penal­ty dur­ing his years as a State Senator and who, as a for­mer Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, repeat­ed­ly vot­ed to uphold death sen­tences — has changed his stance on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. In a recent piece for The Huffington Post, Lake said he not only sup­port­ed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as a State Senator, he ​“vig­or­ous­ly advo­cat­ed” for it and ​“cast my vote at appro­pri­ate times to uphold that harsh and most final sen­tence” as Chief Justice. His views have evolved, he said, pri­mar­i­ly because of con­cerns about wrong­ful con­vic­tions. ​“My faith in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, which had always been so steady, was shak­en by the rev­e­la­tion that in some cas­es inno­cent men and women were being con­vict­ed of seri­ous crimes,” he wrote. However, his con­cerns about the death penal­ty are broad­er than just the ques­tion of inno­cence. Lake says he also ques­tions whether legal pro­tec­tions for peo­ple with dimin­ished cul­pa­bil­i­ty as a result of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, men­tal ill­ness, or youth, are ade­quate. ​“For intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, we can use an IQ score to approx­i­mate impair­ment, but no sim­i­lar numer­ic scale exists to deter­mine just how men­tal­ly ill some­one is, or how brain trau­ma may have impact­ed their cul­pa­bil­i­ty. Finally, even when evi­dence of dimin­ished cul­pa­bil­i­ty exists, some jurors have trou­ble emo­tion­al­ly sep­a­rat­ing the char­ac­ter­is­tic of the offend­er from the details of the crime,” he said. He describes the case of Lamondre Tucker, a Louisiana death row inmate who was 18 at the time of the offense and has an IQ of 74, plac­ing him just out­side the Supreme Court’s bans on the exe­cu­tion of juve­niles and peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dia­bil­i­ties. Lake argues, ​“Taken togeth­er, these fac­tors indi­cate that he is most like­ly just as impaired as those indi­vid­u­als that the Court has deter­mined it is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al to exe­cute.” He con­cludes, ​“Our inabil­i­ty to deter­mine who pos­sess­es suf­fi­cient cul­pa­bil­i­ty to war­rant a death sen­tence draws into ques­tion whether the death penal­ty can ever be con­sti­tu­tion­al under the Eighth Amendment. I have come to believe that it probably cannot.”

(I. Beverly Lake, ​“Why Protecting the Innocent From a Death Sentence Isn’t Enough,” The Huffington Post, May 18, 2016.) See New Voices and Innocence.