Top NC court vacates ruling for death-row inmates claiming racial bias in their sentences
Image from Shutterstock.
The North Carolina Supreme Court has vacated a judge’s finding that racial bias played a role in the death sentences of four inmates.
The state supreme court said the judge should have granted prosecutors more time to respond to a statistical study used to support the inmates’ racial bias claim, the Raleigh News & Observer reports in a story noted by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. The cases now return to the trial court where the defendants will try once again to prove racial bias.
Judge Greg Weeks had found bias under the state’s now-repealed Racial Justice Act, which required death sentences to be converted to life without parole when racial bias infects trials. The law was enacted in 2009 and repealed in 2013.
In its Dec. 18 decision in the case of Marcus Reymond Robinson, the state supreme court said Weeks should have granted a continuance sought by prosecutors to collect additional statistical data. In a separate order, the state supreme court said error recognized in Robinson’s case required it to also vacate the trial judge’s finding of racial bias in the trials of Tilmon Golphin, Christina “Queen” Walters and Quintel Augustine.
Robinson had relied a study of 173 capital trials in North Carolina between 1990 and 2010 that showed prosecutors were more than twice as likely to use peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors who are black than potential jurors who are white.
Most of the state’s 152 death-row inmates have challenged their sentences under the law.
