The first hear­ing under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act con­vened at the begin­ning of February for death row inmate Marcus Robinson. The Racial Justice Act was passed in 2009, allow­ing death row inmates to use empir­i­cal and sta­tis­ti­cal data to demon­strate racial bias in their con­vic­tion or sen­tenc­ing. Following changes in North Carolina’s leg­is­la­ture in the 2010 elec­tions, there were efforts to repeal the Act. Governor Perdue vetoed a repeal bill and the leg­is­la­ture could not over­ride her veto. Robinson, who is black, was sen­tenced to death for a 1991 mur­der of a white vic­tim. He is seek­ing to have his sen­tence reduced to life with­out parole by show­ing racial bias in the jury selec­tion for his tri­al. Barbara O’Brien, an expert in this area from Michigan State University, tes­ti­fied that state pros­e­cu­tors in cap­i­tal tri­als exclud­ed qual­i­fied black jurors at more than twice the rate of qual­i­fied non-black jurors. For Robinson’s jury pool, qual­i­fied blacks where 3.5 times more like­ly to be reject­ed. O’Brien said, ​“Being black does pre­dict whether or not the state will strike the poten­tial juror, even when con­trol­ling for these oth­er vari­ables.” Robinson’s hear­ing is expect­ed to con­clude by mid-February, and the pre­sid­ing judge’s deci­sion will shape the way the new law is inter­pret­ed in the future. Other stud­ies in North Carolina have shown that those who mur­der white vic­tims are more like­ly to receive the death penal­ty than those who mur­der black victims.

Many oth­er inmates have filed sim­i­lar chal­lenges under the Act. Defense attor­neys argue that North Carolina’s death penal­ty law is unpre­dictably applied, and thus allows for racial bias to influ­ence deci­sions rather than the rel­a­tive sever­i­ty of the crime. ​“Currently, only about 1% of the peo­ple who are accused of inten­tion­al mur­der are receiv­ing the death penal­ty. There are wild dis­par­i­ties,” says Malcolm Hunter, one of Robinson’s lawyers and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. I could show you the sum­maries of 50 cas­es any year in North Carolina and say ​‘I want to pick out the two or three that get the death penal­ty’, and you’d nev­er be able to do it.”

(K. Dailey, ​“Death penal­ty case puts racism on tri­al in North Carolina,” BBC News, February 7, 2012). See Race.

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