Death Row Prisoners in North Carolina File Racial Bias Suits

Is the death penalty fair to people of all races? This week, scores of prisoners on North Carolina's death row took the chance to try and test that question.

Last year, North Carolina approved the Racial Justice Act, which empowers judges to overturn a person's death sentence if she finds that racial bias occurred in the sentencing process. Signed a year ago this week by Gov. Beverly Purdue, the law gave the state's 159 death row inmates one year to appeal their sentence. By the deadline — this past Tuesday — fully 119 had filed complaints alleging racial bias in their sentencing.

For my money, they have a pretty good shot and proving their case. Here in the U.S., the color of a victim's skin is the best predictor for whether a convicted murderer will be sentenced to death. As Te-Ping Chen blogged here earlier this summer, defendants in North Carolina are three times more likely to receive the death penalty if they're convicted of murdering a white person.

Racial bias is systemic: Southern prosecutors, for example, are particularly well-known for their efforts to keep their juries lily-white — by dismissing black jurors for any number of reasons, including for being "too vocal" or "arrogant" (as one Alabama prosecutor declared this spring).

Cases like that of Jeremy Murrell — also of North Carolina — makes such bias glaringly clear. Murrell, who's black, was convicted of killing a white victim, and sentenced to death by a majority-white jury that was assembled by prosecutors who struck fully 80% of qualified black jurors from the jury pool, and only 26% of qualified white jurors. Not surprisingly, Murrell is now challenging his sentence under the Act.

Of the 119 convicts challenging their death sentences, some will win and some will lose. There's no doubt that the litigation will be expensive — but that doesn't make the suits any less worth pursuing. You can't put a value on an innocent life — or the integrity of our judicial system.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons