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Floundering for a response

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Staff

Chris Fitzsimon

Race plays a role in determining who receives the death penalty in North Carolina, specifically the race of the victim of a crime. That was the disturbingly simple and clear conclusion of a study released last week by two national scholars who examined more than 15,000 murder cases in North Carolina over 28 years, from 1980 to 2007.

The study by Michael L. Radelet at the University of Colorado and Glenn L. Pierce of Northeastern University found that the odds of someone receiving the death penalty in North Carolina are almost three times greater if the victim is white than if the victim is black.

The findings come as the Racial Justice Act, passed last year by the General Assembly to allow defendants to present evidence of racial bias, is under attack from right-wing forces. The study ought to put a damper on their efforts to repeal or significantly weaken the act, which at least provides a formal avenue for discussion of the role of race in death penalty cases.

The findings also reinforce the conclusions of a similar study released nine years ago by researchers at UNC who found that the odds of receiving the death penalty in North Carolina increase by 3.4 times if the victim of the murder is white instead of a person of color.

That study was widely reported at the time and fiercely attacked by cranks and death penalty supporters who claimed it was scientifically flawed and discounted its findings because they contradicted their own contentions that the capital punishment system was administered fairly.

Now that an expansive national study has confirmed the findings of the 2001 report, some death penalty supporters are making even more bizarre claims. The head of Raleigh’s leading right-wing think tank said this week that if the race of the victim matters, the solution is to execute more people who kill blacks.

The problem of course is that race is just one of the capital punishment system’s well-documented flaws. The system also discriminates based on class and is applied so arbitrarily that a former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court called it a lottery. That’s hardly the equal justice our constitution guarantees.

Most importantly, the criminal justice system is not perfect. Widely publicized cases of wrongful convictions and exonerations have made that painfully clear in the last few years. Inmates freed from prison have been issued pardons and paid compensation for their time behind bars, but that wouldn’t help much when a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.

The right’s only real justification for killing someone to show that killing someone is wrong is their misinformed notion that somehow the death penalty is a deterrent that prevents other murders. The few studies that make that claim have been widely discredited.

Common sense plays a role too. North Carolina last executed a prisoner almost four years ago, but the state crime rate is at a 25-year low and the murder rate declined by almost 20 percent in 2009. Executions do not deter crime.

The new study has forced death penalty supporters to finally admit that race plays a role in who receives the death penalty. Leaving the Racial Justice Act in place and intact is the least state policymakers can do.

They need to find the courage to take the next step and join the 15 states and virtually all the rest of the western world and end capital punishment once and for all.

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

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