‘Race matters' in N.C. death penalty

A new study by two university researchers has found that a killer convicted in North Carolina has nearly three times greater a chance of receiving the death sentence if the victim is white rather than black.

“It’s just kind of baffling that in this day and age – race matters,” said Michael Radelet, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who compiled the report alongside Glenn Pierce, a research scientist in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston.

In the report released this week, Pierce and Radelet examined 15,281 homicides in North Carolina between 1980 and 2007, of which 368 resulted in death sentences for those convicted.

Using Supplemental Homicide Reports from the FBI, as well as other records from the N.C. Department of Correction and the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the authors obtained information on the 352 death row cases dealing with black and white victims. The two threw out the other 16 cases not specific to those races.

The study, to be published in The North Carolina Law Review next year and deemed the most comprehensive to date of the modern administration of the death penalty in North Carolina, found that the odds of receiving a death sentence in North Carolina “in a white victim case are on average 2.96 times higher than are the odds of a death sentence in a black victim case.”

“Given these findings the authors would advocate continuous monitoring of the death penalty in North Carolina to see if patterns of racial bias change,” said Radelet, one of the nation’s leading experts on the death penalty.

While Pierce’s and Radelet’s analysis certainly carries some weight in the legitimacy of the life taking measure – an issue currently under debate with the passage of the Racial Justice Act last year – the district attorney of Greene, Lenoir and Wayne counties finds their results as one of “1,000 cuts aiming to attack” the validity of the death penalty.

“Statistical measures have to be taken with a grain of salt and you can’t judge the quality of a sentence without looking at the raw data,” said Branson Vickory, lead prosecutor for the three counties comprising the 8^th Judicial District. “I have tried people who were part of this study and nobody has ever contacted me about this. I do not know how they are making subjective determinations that need to be made as to the quality of the evidence.”

Vickory believes the two resigned their study to pure numbers.

“I know (the death penalty) is not focused on race, even though that is what they are trying to say,” he said. “Very often, I do not even know what races people are in cases where we are making these early decisions.”

The two researchers stamped their study as “statistically significant” and that “the probability of obtaining a similar result is less than 5 percent if racial bias were not an option.”

Pierce and Radelet made this assurance by saying they looked for any additional factors – such as multiple victims or homicides accompanied by an additional felony, such as rape or robbery – that might explain any differences in each of the cases with death penalty sentencing.

Examining these factors “show that the reason why the probability of a death sentence is higher for those who are suspected of killing whites than for those who are suspected of killing blacks is not because the former cases tend to be more aggravated,” the authors wrote. “Regardless of whether there is zero, one or two additional legally relevant factors present, cases with white victims are more likely to result in a death sentence than are cases with black victims.”

Vickory said the two left out one gravely important and immeasurable detail – the evidence that convinces a jury to impose the death penalty.

“Our primary driving force as (district attorneys) when we are making decisions on the nature of a murder, whether to go first-degree with the death penalty or reduce it to second degree, is the evidence and the likelihood of success in prosecution,” Vickory said. “If we have a strong case with witnesses that will come forward and testify, as well as scientific evidence, we are lot more likely to be able to get a death penalty than we are if we got witnesses that are waffling and not willing to come forward, regardless of anyone’s race.”

One of the top states to use the death penalty over the past 30 years, North Carolina has one of the nation’s largest death rows with 155 men and four women facing execution, which Vickory said racially mirrors that of the state’s general prison population.

Vickory added there are people from his district on death row who killed both white and black people, some in the same case.

“I would be interested on how they came out on the survey,” he said.

Noelle Talley, spokeswoman for N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper, said the Department of Justice has not had a chance to review Pierce and Radelet’s study, since the full study has not yet been published.

Talley did say the N.C. Indigent Defense Services have also commissioned a study related to the Racial Justice Act, and that the department plans to review both.

Vickory said whatever the final verdict is on the death penalty, it remains one issue he believes should be left to open discussion, not stats.

“North Carolina politicians need to look at an honest open public discussion about whether we want the death penalty,” he said. “It is dangerous when you start trying to use statistics to make points.”

Wesley Brown can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wbrown@freedomenc.com.

Breakout:

The beginning of the end for the death penalty?

A push to stop doctors from assisting in executions, and a lawsuit filed by some death row inmates challenging the use of lethal injections as cruel and unusual punishment, have halted executions in North Carolina for roughly three years.

n Last summer, the N.C. General Assembly passed the Racial Justice Act, one of only two laws of its kind in the nation.

n It allows Tar Heel judges, along with those in Kentucky, to consider statistical evidence that suggests racial bias as a key factor in prosecutors' seeking, or a court's imposing, the death penalty. Current death row inmates have until Aug. 10 to file their challenges.

n The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that statistical evidence of racial bias could not be considered in individual cases, but that states could pass their own legislation to do so. 

n The recent study by university researchers Michael Radelet and Glenn Pierce is the first to be released since North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act.