On Friday, the North Carolina Supreme Court reinstated the life sentence of Marcus Robinson, a 47-year-old Black man who proved before a judge in 2012 that racism had affected trial proceedings that resulted in his death sentence. Robinson had been re-sentenced to life without parole under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA) but was later moved back onto death row after a series of legislative and legal proceedings.
Robinson had originally been on North Carolina’s death row after being convicted of first-degree murder in 1994. But in 2012 he was re-sentenced to life without parole under the RJA, a 2009 state law that allowed death row inmates to be re-sentenced if they could prove race was a significant factor in their sentencing.
But the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature repealed the RJA in 2013, and in 2015 the state’s Supreme Court ruled that Robinson’s case needed new evidentiary proceedings. In 2017, a judge dismissed Robinson’s case without hearing his evidence, arguing that because the RJA had been repealed, he didn’t have a right to a new hearing.
Robinson was then moved back to death row without a new trial.
On Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled that the judge’s move had violated Robinson’s constitutional rights, and reinstated his life sentence.
“Almost exactly 11 years after the passage of the Racial Justice Act, the court’s decision to reverse Marcus Robinson’s death sentence is a critical step toward achieving the goal of that legislation: to break the link between racism and the death penalty in North Carolina,” Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Capital Punishment Project, said in a statement. (The ACLU represents Robinson.)
“The evidence uncovered by RJA shined a spotlight on an ugly truth: Racism plays a starring role in determining who gets executed,” Stubbs’ statement continued. “Of course, nearly 50 years of data have shown that there is no way to extricate racism from the death penalty—the punishment has no place in a country that values fairness, justice, and equality.”
Three other death row inmates—Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters and Quintel Augustine—had also been re-sentenced to life under the RJA in 2012 but were then sent back to death row after a judge threw out their case in 2017. (Golphin and Augustine are Black; Walters is Lumbee and Cherokee Indian.) It’s not yet clear how the court’s reinstatement of Robinson’s life sentence will affect their cases moving forward.
Over 100 death row inmates had filed RJA claims before the law was repealed, but only Robinson, Golphin, Walters and Augustine had been granted hearings and successfully had their their death sentences overturned.
However, in June, the state Supreme Court issued a sweeping ruling that the RJA’s repeal cannot be applied retroactively, meaning that everyone who filed a RJA claim before the Act was repealed — meaning over 100 death row inmates — has a right to a hearing to prove racism affected their sentences. That ruling also means that, at the bare minimum, Golphin, Walters and Augustine will get new hearings to present their evidence of racial bias.
Robinson, Golphin, Walters and Augustine had already proven before a judge that racial bias affected their sentences, not just systematically but also in their specific trials—particularly during jury selection.
Robinson’s RJA claim cited a study of jury selection in North Carolina’s capital cases done by researchers at Michigan State University College of Law. The study found that between 1990 and 2010, Black jurors were 2.26 times more likely than all other jurors to be struck by a prosecutor. The 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Batson v. Kentucky makes it unconstitutional to strike jurors based solely on race.
Robinson’s team also presented evidence that the prosecutors in his case asked demeaning questions about potential Black jurors—such as questioning whether one juror could read—along with other examples of racial bias.
In its ruling, the North Carolina Supreme Court decried racial bias in jury selection, writing that the “same racially oppressive beliefs that fueled segregation manifested themselves through public lynchings, the disproportionate application of the death penalty against African-American defendants, and the exclusion of African-Americans from juries.”
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Write to Madeleine Carlisle at madeleine.carlisle@time.com.
DankSouls_666 on August 16th, 2020 at 20:12 UTC »
He's taken off death row, not free from prison.
oldfogey12345 on August 16th, 2020 at 19:15 UTC »
I want the death penalty banned unless the person did a crime that I personally find horrifying or goes against my political beliefs.
Reddit
Ffffqqq on August 16th, 2020 at 15:44 UTC »
Michigan State University 11
Found that between 1990 and 2010, state prosecutors struck about 53 percent of black people eligible for juries in criminal cases, vs. about 26 percent of white people. The study’s authors concluded that the chance of this occurring in a race-neutral process was less than 1 in 10 trillion
Even after adjusting for excuses given by prosecutors that tend to correlate with race, the 2-to-1 discrepancy remained
The state legislature had previously passed a law stating that death penalty defendants who could demonstrate racial bias in jury selection could have their sentences changed to life without parole. The legislature later repealed that law
Levinson et al. 10
“Mock jurors” were given the same evidence from a fictional robbery case but then shown alternate security camera footage depicting either a light-skinned or dark-skinned suspect
Jurors were more likely to evaluate ambiguous, race-neutral evidence against the dark-skinned suspect as incriminating and more likely to find the dark-skinned suspect guilty
Johnson et al. 12
“Black defendants who kill white victims are seven times as likely to receive the death penalty as are black defendants who kill black victims. … Moreover, black defendants who kill white victims are more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as are white defendants who kill white victims.”UNC 11
Murderers who kill white people are three times more likely to get the death penalty than murderers who kill black peopleBaldus et al. 04
“One quarter to one third of death sentenced defendants with white victims would have avoided the death penalty if their victims had been black.”Beckett et al. 14
Looking at 33 years of data found that after adjusting for variables such as the number of victims and brutality of the crimes, jurors in Washington state were 4.5 times more likely to impose the death penalty on black defendants accused of aggravated murder than on white onesGross et al. 17
Black people are more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder when the victim was white. Only about 15 percent of people killed by black people were white, but 31 percent of black exonerees were wrongly convicted of killing white people. More generally, black people convicted of murder are 50 percent more likely to be innocent than white people convicted of murder
Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be wrongly convicted of sexual assault and 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes. (And remember, data on wrongful convictions is limited in that it can only consider the wrongful convictions we know about.)
Eberhardt et al. 06
This study found that when a black person was accused of killing a white person, defendants with darker skin and more “stereotypically black” features were twice as likely to receive a death sentence. When the victim was black, there was almost no differenceSource: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1OIVHtml45EcMSi3suI5Zn1ymef5Y-8hnHbeY6kxp-ec/