In Defense of the Repeal of the 2009 Racial Justice Act | Eastern North Carolina Now

   Publisher's note: This post is more of an op-ed than it is press release, so I place it under Bill Cook's name, but put it under guest editorial.

    Tom Keith, a retired District Attorney and S. Stanley Young, a PhD educated statistician put together this information and the words explaining it here below.

   But first a few words from Bill Cook.

    In a couple of days I will be in Raleigh voting on an override ballot. My fellow legislators and I will try to override Governor Perdue's veto of Senate Bill 9, repeal of the 2009 Racial Justice Act (RJA). I believe the RJA to be one of the worst bills ever enacted into law. This is a law passed by the Democrat controlled General Assembly year before last. It effectively does away with capital punishment while wasting millions of dollars in court costs on useless studies. Most, if not all, District Attorneys in North Carolina oppose this law. I have even talked to a Defense Attorney here in Beaufort County who opposes this law. This is a bad law and must be repealed.

    Please use my comments and those of Tom Keith, retired DA, in the attached article in your respective publications. Thank you.

   The Op-ed in Defense of the Repeal    written by Tom Keith and S. Stanley Young

    The 2009 Racial Justice Act ("RJA") was passed based on incomplete data. The contention for the published half-truth that African Americans ("AA") are more likely than whites ("W") to receive the death penalty for interracial homicides was based on partial data from two sealed studies: (1) an unfinished and unpublished Michigan State U. study; and (2) an unpublished UNC-CH study. We now have data that appears to show that the proponents of the RJA based their opinions by using every homicide whether it qualified for the death penalty or not. The appropriate pool should contain only homicides with aggravating factors that qualify for the death penalty, not all homicides.

    State law lists the aggravating factors necessary for a homicide to be punishable by death. In 2009, death penalty opponents using the sealed UNC-CH study contended that African Americans who kill white victims receive the death penalty in 5.1% of the cases versus 3.5% for whites for killing an African American victim. This was an inappropriate comparison. Instead, the anti-death penalty advocates should have only used the data from the homicides with aggravating circumstances.
North Carolina General Assembly     photo by Stan Deatherage
    When comparing only homicides with aggravating circumstances, both races have the same approximate 10% chance of receiving the death penalty in cross-racial homicides. (AA/W: 33/365 or 9%; W/AA: 5/45 or 11%) This is based on the 2009 UNC-CH study which was only recently unsealed. The Michigan study results on this point are not available.

    A more complex reason for the alleged cross-racial disparity is not found in institutional racism but in the different patterns of crimes committed by the different races. E.g., Whites are over represented in serial killings; Whites are over represented in Wall Street offenses; and Whites are over represented in drunk driving offenses. Homicides are no exception.

    Homicide racial patterns were studied by Dr. Joseph Katz, the statistician in the seminal U. S. Supreme Court McCleskey decision, which held that statewide statistics were not appropriate to prove racial discrimination in a death row inmate's case. Katz found that in Georgia's cross racial homicides, that each race committed aggravated homicides at vastly different rates. For example, African Americans on death row committed an armed robbery during their interracial homicides 67% of the time versus 22 % for whites; and African Americans committed an execution style interracial murder 33% of the time versus 12% for whites.

    This is significant since armed robberies and execution style murders in most states and in NC are aggravating factors that qualifies a murderer for the death penalty.

    The recently vetoed Senate Bill 9 would still assure that no prosecutor can use race as a basis to seek the death penalty, but eliminates the use by the defense of statistics from other counties from decades before to make their case. In fact, in a pending Cumberland County case, no allegation is presently made that racial prejudice resulted in the defendant's death sentence. It is historical statistics that do not properly take aggravating factors into account that would require the murderer's life be spared.

    The other part of the 2009 RJA allows statewide statistics to be used to show discrimination in jury selection. There has never been a case reversed by the NC Supreme Court for a prosecutor illegally excusing a juror for racial reasons in a capital case. In fact, in one NC County, where such jury discrimination claims are now being made under the 2009 RJA, no juror race claims were ever raised at trial in about half of the capital murder convictions now under attack. This part of the 2009 RJA, of allowing re-litigation of decades-old jury selection issues is already barred by existing law and is a waste of scarce state resources.

    The costs of these RJA claims will be staggering. Prosecutors were told by the Defense that the discovery file in the Michigan State U. study is one million pages long, including the jury portion of 300,000 pages. The State's overworked prosecutors will not be able to read and assimilate this vast amount of information. The well-funded defense could just win by attrition.

    The millions of dollars that would be spent to re-litigate these capital cases would better be spent on programs that would reduce the conditions that make homicide the leading cause of death in NC of African American males under the age of 24 and make African Americans 4.5 times more likely to die of a homicide than a White.