Racial Justice Act: Wrong for North Carolina | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: Seth H. Edwards is the District Attorney for North Carolina's, 2nd Judicial District, which covers the counties of Beaufort, Hyde, Martin, Tyrrell and Washington.

   We are excited to have the District Attorney's knowledgeable opinion expressed here, and welcome many more on this subject, or any other.

    Recently the first case to be heard under the Racial Justice Act (RJA) was decided in Cumberland County in favor of the defendant, Marcus Robinson. As a result, Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks converted Robinson's 1994 death sentence to life without parole. Robinson, a black male, was convicted of killing Eric Tomblom, a 17 year old white teenager. Judge Weeks made a finding in the case of the "persistent, pervasive, and distorting role of race in jury selection throughout North Carolina," based primarily on a statistical study out of Michigan State University. With his ruling, Judge Weeks overturned the verdict of 12 jurors as well as the trial judge who would have been in the best position to determine if race were a factor in jury selection.

    The RJA, passed in 2009, allows a death row defendant to use statistics from another part of NC in an effort to overturn his death sentence, even when the defendant is unable to show racial discrimination in his particular case. North Carolina prosecutors favor Senate Bill 9 which amended the RJA. The amendment still assures that a person's race shall not be a basis for seeking or implementing the death penalty; however, the amendment would require a defendant to show race was a significant factor in his particular case.

    Last year, both the NC House and Senate passed SB 9, but the Governor later vetoed it. Thereafter, the North Carolina Senate voted to override Governor Perdue's veto, but the North Carolina House has not taken up the vote (due to lack of necessary votes I presume). As a result, the original RJA remains in effect.

    Prosecutors strongly contend that the original RJA has resulted in unintended consequences. For example, in Beaufort County Terry Ball has filed a claim under the RJA, seeking to convert his death sentence to life without parole. Terry Ball is white, and his victim was white. A Beaufort County jury, consisting of 10 whites and 2 blacks, convicted Ball of First Degree Murder in 1994, and that same jury determined that due to aggravating factors, Ball deserved the ultimate punishment of death. Now under the RJA, Ball is asserting he deserves a life sentence instead of death due to racial discrimination. I hope you are asking yourself, "How can a white man who brutally killed a white woman claim racial discrimination?" The simple answer-because he can under the current RJA. This method completely ignores the brutality of these crimes and that is simply wrong for North Carolina.

    When this act was debated in 2009, proponents of the RJA (who were very smart in naming the legislation) espoused statistics from studies at Michigan State and UNC-Chapel Hill that showed African Americans are more likely than White Americans to receive the death penalty in interracial homicides. It is now becoming clear that RJA supporters based their opinions on data that was either incomplete or should not have been considered. Let me explain: the UNC-CH study, which was just recently unsealed, used every homicide instead of only those homicides that qualified for the death penalty. This is a very key point, as the aggravating factors that distinguish capital murder from non-capital murder make all the difference in the world. When the RJA was originally debated, proponents at that time told us that that African Americans who killed white victims in NC received the death penalty in 5.1% of the cases versus 3.5% for whites who killed an African American victim. This was an inappropriate comparison.

    When comparing only homicides with aggravating circumstances (that qualify for the death penalty), both races have the same approximate 10% chance of receiving the death penalty in cross-racial homicides. This is based on the 2009 UNC-CH study. Presently I do not have the same data from the MSU study but I expect it to contain similar findings.

    The RJA is really a back door attempt to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina. Supporters of the RJA realize that our legislature is unlikely to overturn capital punishment in this state if a majority of its citizens still support it. The effects of the RJA thus far are so far sweeping and costly that this law could be the beginning of the end of capital punishment in NC.

    Nevertheless, prosecutors agree that race should never play a role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors focus on the facts, the law, and the victim. Claims of racial bias are best addressed by the trial judge hearing the case, as adequate safeguards are still in place to address these wrongs. If Senate Bill 9 fails to become law, then we will continue to waste precious resources on claims like those filed by Terry Ball that have no business seeing the light of day in a courtroom.