Marcus Robinson will be the first North Carolina death row inmate to have a sentencing challenge heard in court based on the state’s 2009 Racial Justice Act. According to the act, a death row inmate who can establish through statistical studies that his sentence was racially discriminatory can seek to have it commuted to life in prison. Robinson’s lawyers plan to argue that he received a death sentence partly because he is black and his victim was white They plan to cite several North Carolina studies, including one that found that a defendant who killed a white victim was 2.6 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if there were no white victims in the crime. His lawyers will also cite statistics showing that prosecutors in the state reject minorities for capital juries at twice the rate they reject whites. In Robinson’s case, the prosecutors rejected half the potential jurors who were black but only 15 percent of potential jurors who were other races. His sentencing jury was comprised of nine whites, one American Indian and two blacks, plus two white alternates. The Racial Justice Act was challenged in the state’s prior legislative session, but it was upheld.
(P. Woolverton and G. Phillips, “Fayetteville man’s death row hearing is first under the Racial Justice Act,” Fayetteville Observer, July 25, 2011). See Race.
