North Carolina Supreme Court Restores Life Sentences to Three Prisoners Whose Death Sentences Violated Racial Justice Act

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ordered that three African American death-row pris­on­ers who had proven that their death sen­tences vio­lat­ed the state’s since repealed Racial Justice Act (RJA) must be resen­tenced to life impris­on­ment with­out pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. In three deci­sions issued on September 25, 2020, the court ruled that North Carolina had vio­lat­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al prin­ci­ples of dou­ble jeop­ardy and the pro­hi­bi­tions against after-the-fact enhance­ments of pun­ish­ment when the Cumberland County tri­al court resen­tenced Christina Walters, Quintel Augustine, and Tilmon Golphin to death after they had estab­lished their enti­tle­ment to a life sen­tence under the RJA. 

The court’s three deci­sions applied its June 5, 2020 rul­ing in State v. Ramseur to hold that the state legislature’s 2012 retroac­tive amend­ments that lim­it­ed the grounds upon which courts could over­turn death sen­tences and its sub­se­quent repeal of the RJA vio­lat­ed state and fed­er­al con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tions against ex post fac­to laws. It fur­ther ruled that its August 14, 2020 deci­sion in State v. Robinson barred the reim­po­si­tion of the death penal­ty after the tri­al court found that race had been a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in their death sen­tences. The tri­al court’s find­ings, the court said in Robinson, estab­lished the defendant’s legal enti­tle­ment to a life sen­tence, amount­ing to an acquit­tal of the death penal­ty. North Carolina’s con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against twice being placed in jeop­ardy of death, the court said, barred the state appeals courts from reim­pos­ing a death sen­tence once a tri­al judge had issued an RJA rul­ing in favor of a death-row prisoner.

Walters, Augustine, and Golphin had filed their Racial Justice Act chal­lenges before the leg­is­la­ture lim­it­ed the grounds on which they could raise an RJA claim. They nev­er­the­less won relief under the amend­ed Racial Justice Act on December 13, 2012. That relief was rescind­ed and they were resen­tenced to death after the Racial Justice Act was repealed in 2013. 

The orig­i­nal Racial Justice Act allowed those on death row to chal­lenge their sen­tence if they could prove that race had been ​“a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in deci­sions to seek or impose the sen­tence of death in the coun­ty, the pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al dis­trict, the judi­cial divi­sion, or the State at the time the death sen­tence was sought or imposed.” In an effort to prove dis­crim­i­na­tion, lawyers for the pris­on­ers com­mis­sioned a review and sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of 20 years of jury selec­tion prac­tices in death penal­ty cas­es across the state. That study revealed that, with remark­able con­sis­ten­cy both over time and in coun­ties across the state, pros­e­cu­tors had struck prospec­tive Black jurors from serv­ing in cap­i­tal cas­es at 2.5 times the rate of oth­er jurors. An exten­sive regres­sion analy­sis of hun­dreds of fac­tors that could poten­tial­ly explain the strikes found that the huge dis­par­i­ty in strike rates was attrib­ut­able to race. The RJA defen­dants also pre­sent­ed evi­dence from jury-selec­tion train­ing mate­ri­als show­ing that their pros­e­cu­tors had been instruct­ed on how to invent ​“race-neu­tral” rea­sons to jus­ti­fy strik­ing Black jurors, as well as evi­dence from jury-selec­tion notes show­ing that pros­e­cu­tors referred to Black jurors in denigrating terms.

In Marcus Robinson’s case, the North Carolina Supreme Court stressed that the Racial Justice Act had been, in part, a response to the North Carolina courts’ fail­ure to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s pro­hi­bi­tion against the use of dis­cre­tionary jury strikes to remove prospec­tive jurors on the basis of race. The court not­ed that in the near­ly 35 years since the Supreme Court pro­hib­it­ed strik­ing any juror on the basis of race, it had ​“nev­er held that a pros­e­cu­tor inten­tion­al­ly dis­crim­i­nat­ed against a juror of col­or.” Including the deci­sions of North Carolina’s inter­me­di­ate appel­late courts, North Carolina appeals judges had sided with pros­e­cu­tors in more than 110 cas­es in which defen­dants alleged pros­e­cu­tors had chal­lenged jurors because of their race. In that time, the state appeals courts had nev­er sided with a Black defen­dant on a dis­put­ed jury strike. 

Continuing Resistance By Lower Courts to Redressing Race Discrimination in Jury Selection

A recent rul­ing by a Forsyth County Superior County judge illus­trates the on-going hos­til­i­ty in the North Carolina courts to enforc­ing the pro­hi­bi­tion against jury dis­crim­i­na­tion. On August 24, Judge Stuart Albright, him­self a for­mer dis­trict attor­ney, denied death-row pris­on­er Russell Tucker’s claim that his pros­e­cu­tors, David Spence and Robert Lang, had dis­crim­i­na­to­ri­ly removed Black jurors from his case and relied on a pros­e­cu­tor-train­ing doc­u­ment, ​“Batson Justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives,” to man­u­fac­ture facial­ly race-neu­tral jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for their strikes. In an affi­davit pre­sent­ed by the defense, National Book Award-win­ning his­to­ri­an Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, the direc­tor of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, described many of the rea­sons con­tained in the train­ing hand­out as a mod­ern appli­ca­tion of the same types of lan­guage used to jus­ti­fy Jim Crow poli­cies, seg­re­ga­tion, and vot­er sup­pres­sion. “[M]any of the rea­sons” in the train­ing mate­ri­als ​“were not race neu­tral at all,” he wrote, but instead ​“are based on long­stand­ing racist stereo­types that have been used to deny rights to Blacks for centuries.” 

Albright, who refused to con­sid­er evi­dence of his­tor­i­cal dis­crim­i­na­tion in jury selec­tion by coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors, min­i­mized the impor­tance of the pros­e­cu­tors’ adop­tion of rea­sons con­tained in the train­ing doc­u­ment. ​“There is noth­ing wrong or improp­er with know­ing legal­ly per­mis­si­ble and imper­mis­si­ble rea­sons to exer­cise peremp­to­ry chal­lenges,” Albright wrote. ​“In fact, being pre­pared for tri­al requires defense attor­neys and pros­e­cu­tors to know legal­ly per­mis­si­ble and imper­mis­si­ble rea­sons to exer­cise peremptory challenges.”

Tucker’s lawyers said they would appeal. ​“We are dis­ap­point­ed that the judge ignored such clear evi­dence of race dis­crim­i­na­tion, both in Mr. Tucker’s indi­vid­ual tri­al and his­tor­i­cal­ly in the Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office,” Elizabeth Hambourger said in a state­ment. ​“The judge’s deci­sion ignores our own state supreme court’s recent deci­sion on this issue, and so we are thus hope­ful that the high court will cor­rect this injustice.”