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Overcoming the demagoguery about death and taking steps forward – barely

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Staff

Chris Fitzsimon

The death penalty was front-and- center at the General Assembly Tuesday, as lawmakers debated proposals to prohibit the execution of people with a severe mental illness and to provide safeguards to make it less likely that race will play a role in capital cases.

After a heated and emotional debate, the House passed the Racial Justice Act that would allow a defendant to present evidence that race was a significant factor in the decision to seek the death penalty or impose it.

House Minority Leader Paul Stam made a series of absurd claims during the debate, most offensively that lawmakers who supported the bill would somehow be responsible for murders committed because, according to Stam, the death penalty is a deterrent.

The debate also included exchanges on topics that had little to do with the proposal: the gruesome details of specific crimes, the exoneration of people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, even the Holocaust.

The bill simply gives a capital defendant a specific opportunity to make the case that race was playing an improper role in his or her case. That’s it. It is not an attempt to abolish the death penalty and it has nothing to do with past reforms of capital punishment or guilt or innocence.

People convicted of first-degree murder are either sentenced to death or life in prison without parole. Those are the only choices. You would think that adding a procedure to make sure that decision is made fairly wouldn’t inspire such vigorous opposition. Thank goodness a narrow majority of the House understands that.

Tuesday morning, a House committee narrowly approved legislation to prevent the execution of people with a severe mental illness, which doesn’t seem like such a radical idea either. But you’d never know it listening to the debate.

Stam told the committee that allowing attorneys for death row inmates to present evidence that a client was severely mentally ill at the time of the trial would costs millions of dollars and clog up the courts.

The Administrative Office of the Court disputes that, but even if it were true isn’t that what courts are for, to determine the appropriate sentence for people convicted of crimes?

And as Rep. Pricey Harrison pointed out, if lawmakers believe that in the future the state should not execute people who have a serious mental disability, then the state shouldn’t execute people currently on death row with severe mental illness.

And just like defendants affected by the Racial Justice Act, inmates with a severe mental disability who are convicted of first-degree murder will not go free. They will spend the rest of their lives in prison.

That seems lost on many of the opponents of both the Racial Justice Act and the proposal to prohibit the execution of people with a severe mental illness, as does the process that is used to decide if someone is sentenced to death.

Sentences in capital cases are determined in separate court proceedings. That is because the system recognizes that a death sentence is not appropriate for everyone convicted of first-degree murder, only the “worst of the worst.”

The process is based on the assumption that people should not be sentenced to death based on the color of their skin or the race of the victim. And that people who are mentally retarded or have a severe mental illness deserve additional consideration.

The whole process is ultimately based on fairness. The House took important steps Tuesday to get the capital punishment system to live up to that standard.

Chris Fitzsimon is executive director of N.C. Policy Watch.

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