NC Supreme Court fuckery - timing perfectly fits with protests
Death row defendants can argue racism infected their cases, NC Supreme Court rules
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article243310561.html
The NC Supreme Court ruled in favor of two death row inmates Friday, allowing them to continue arguing that their cases were so tainted by race discrimination their sentences should be reduced to life in prison.
The Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which has fought the legislature’s decision to close off that legal path, called the court’s move a “landmark” decision that also allows other death-row inmates to file claims.
North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act passed in 2009 while Democrats controlled the legislature, allowing death row defendants to seek to reduce their sentences to life in prison if they could show racial bias played a role in their cases.
A Republican-controlled General Assembly amended the act three years later and then repealed it in 2013. Six death row prisoners who had either received or sought that relief, arguing discrimination had tainted their jury trials, took their cases to the Supreme Court.
The court Friday ruled in favor of two of those men: Rayford Burke and Andrew Ramseur.
In arguments before the court, attorneys argued that the prosecutor in Burke’s Iredell County case called him a “big black bull” during closing arguments.
In Ramseur’s case, an all-white jury sentenced the 21-year-old black defendant to death. All of the qualified black jurors were rejected, his attorney Daniel Shatz wrote in a 2016 brief.
Both had sought a hearing to present this evidence, but their ongoing claim became moot under the repeal. In the court’s decision, Justice Anita Earls wrote that the repeal violated “ex post facto” standards, meaning it applied a harsher penalty retroactively.
Justice Paul Newby wrote the court’s dissenting opinion: “The Racial Justice Act did not change the punishment for first-degree murder,” he said.
The court’s ruling dropped Friday in the midst of nationwide protests focused on systemic racism in the American justice system.
“This is a momentous decision that sends a clear message: Our state’s highest court will not allow North Carolina to ignore evidence that racism has infected the death penalty,” Center for Death Penalty Litigation Executive Director Gretchen Engel said in a news release. “This was also an urgently needed decision as our state and our nation confront a long history of racism.”
The court has yet to rule on four other defendants’ Racial Justice Act cases: Tilmon Golphin, Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine and Christina Walters.
LAW ABOUT RACIAL INEQUITY OR DEATH PENALTY?
Allison Riggs, a civil rights attorney at the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Civil Justice, praised the ruling and accused Republican lawmakers of being “consistently arbitrary and vindictive in race-related legislation” over the last decade.
“The Racial Justice Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation that the (state legislature) ever enacted, and its repeal was a stain on our history,” Riggs tweeted. “The NC Supreme Court took an important step today in recognizing the rule of law and dignity of human life.”
But Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the NC GOP, said on Twitter he thinks the cases are about Democrats wanting to get rid of the death penalty, not address racial inequity.
“What a horrible day for NC at the State Supreme Court,” Woodhouse said.
“No matter what you read, (no) matter what anybody says, this was the goal of democrats all along,” Woodhouse tweeted. “Find a way to stop executing killers, without telling the voters. Use the race issue as a weapon. It is unfair to the families of the victims. It is wrong. It is not just.”
ATTENTION ON RACIAL JUSTICE DURING GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS
The decision came three days after Chief Justice Cheri Beasley issued a plea for racial understanding in the wake of protests over George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis. In that message, she said racism “stubbornly persists” in the criminal justice system.
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