With its recent repeal of the Racial Justice Act, the N.C. Senate has allowed a partisan issue — the death penalty — to overshadow the larger, nonpartisan concern of racism in the state’s justice system. Gov. Bev Perdue should veto the repeal, and the legislature should go back to the drawing board to try to address specific problems with the law. A wholesale repeal, like the one passed by the Senate last week, won’t get the state any closer to achieving justice, protecting equality or fighting crime.
It is important for the public to understand exactly what the Racial Justice Act entails. It has nothing to do with overturning guilty verdicts; whether someone was convicted of a crime because of racism is a much larger and complex issue, and the Racial Justice Act does not attempt to take it on.
Instead, the law concerns itself with prejudice in the sentencing of these criminals. Assuming a fair trial and a correct verdict, racism could still influence whether a defendant is given the death penalty.
Extensive analysis of data from N.C. courts has shown a correlation between a criminal’s race and whether or not he received the death penalty. In other words, white men and black men convicted of the same crimes were not given similar punishments.
Furthermore, the Racial Justice Act does not attempt to answer the question of whether the death penalty is moral. When it was passed two years ago, legislators both in favor of and opposed to the death penalty voted for it. It is a grave mistake to presume that punishing crime and eliminating racial prejudice in the courts are somehow at odds. They help effect the same goal: a fair and accurate system of justice.
For her part, Gov. Perdue supports the death penalty. But she signed the act into law two years ago, suggesting the falsehood of one Republican senator’s claim that the act is “a back-door attempt to end the death penalty in North Carolina.”
The act provides a mechanism for criminals on death row to appeal their sentencing if they suspect that racial prejudice played a role in it. So it is not the guilt that is in question but rather the severity of the punishment, and the question of whether race played a role in dealing out the death penalty.
Republicans have mounted a disingenuous campaign to stir up fear, suggesting the act would allow convicted murderers to not only get their death sentences commuted to life in prison, but also to one day be granted parole. But the language of the Racial Justice Act is clear, and it specifies that parole should never be granted to criminals who get their sentences commuted under the provisions of the act.
Because life without parole did not exist in North Carolina before 1994, Republicans and the state’s district attorneys claim that commuting a defendant’s sentence from death to life without parole might be construed as imposing a harsher penalty than existed when the crime occurred.
