SALISBURY — A Superior Court judge has ruled that the jury selection process in the 1994 trial of a man convicted for the murder of B.P. and Ruby Tutterow was not tainted by racial prejudice in jury selection.

Frank Junior Chambers, one of three men found guilty in the 1992 murder of the Tutterows, had filed a request for a new trial based on the assertion that the use of peremptory strikes during the jury selection process had been biased against Black jurors. Chambers’ attorneys had filed for the relief based on the prosecution’s notes from the jury selection process and a study from Michigan State University researchers that showed that North Carolina prosecutors were more than two times as likely to strike Black jury members than white ones.

Superior Court Judge Richard Doughton ruled that the case was procedurally barred because Chambers did not raise the claim or file in a timely manner, considering that the note was known to his attorneys in 2011 and the Michigan State study was published after the trial and evidence not in existence at the time of the trial cannot be considered newly discovered. 

In his ruling, Doughton considered the evidence as if it was not procedurally barred as well and said that “defendant’s claim also fails on the merits.” He noted that the burden of persuasion lies solely on the opposition to the peremptory and said that he found former District Attorney Bill Kenerly’s testimony about his reasoning being race-neutral to be reliable and correct.

Chambers, along with co-defendants Robert Lewis Blakeney and William Leroy Barnes, were all convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of the Tutterow couple. Chambers and Barnes were both sentenced to the death penalty in addition to an additional 120 years for armed robbery and burglary. Blakeney received back-to-back life sentences in addition to the same 120-year sentence.

Tutterow trial according to previous Post reporting

Officers with the Salisbury Police Department found the Tutterows’ bodies after being notified by the couple’s niece that they had not been heard from. B.P. had been on a phone call with a family friend when men burst in his door and attacked him, the niece said she had been told by the friend. Prosecutors said during the trial that the three men wrestled with B.P. for the rifle he kept in the home, eventually overpowering him and taking it away from him.

Blakeney testified during the trial that he was not a part of the shooting, but he heard the shooting happen after leaving the room that Chambers and Barnes were holding the couple at gunpoint in. Ruby was found in the fetal position with 10 gunshot wounds. B.P. was found curled on top of his wife, in what prosecutors said was an attempt to protect her after she had already been shot, with five gunshot wounds.

“They shot him with his own guns. B.P. Tutterow listened to his wife scream and die before she was killed,” former Assistant District Attorney Ariadne Symons said during the trial.

The three men were arrested and charged hours after the bodies were found. Officers said that Barnes and Blakeney were found wearing the Tutterows’ jewelry, and testing showed that the bullets that killed the couple came from guns taken from Barnes and Chambers. Testing also showed that Chambers and Barnes both had gunshot residue on their pants. An investigator with the State Bureau of Investigations said that DNA on a cigarette found in the home matched with Chambers’ DNA.

Chambers had been released from police custody earlier on the day of the murder, after pleading guilty and being placed on probation for a robbery. The victim of that robbery was identified as Howard Crabb, a man who had been left paralyzed and in a wheelchair by a stroke. Crabb testified during the trial that he was lying in his bed and unable to move while he was being assaulted by Chambers, who beat and threatened to kill Crabb before leaving with his television, VCR, microwave and car keys.

When Chambers and Barnes received their death sentence they shared a low-five. Barnes shouted “I’ll be back” at reporters while being led to vehicles to make the trip to Raleigh’s Central Prison.

Blakeney blamed his actions on his alcohol abuse at the time of the crimes. Chambers’ family said after the verdict was read that his cocaine abuse played a major factor in his actions.

“Drugs caused this. You know, you are already on death row when you use that stuff, cocaine. It takes you all the way to hell,” Chambers’ niece is quoted as saying after the guilty verdict was announced.

Race and the jury

The jury that convicted Chambers and sentenced him to the death penalty had one Black man sitting on it. During the process of jury selection, Kenerly used 22 peremptory strikes. Six of those strikes were used to remove potential Black jurors, meaning that Kenerly struck six out of nine potential Black jurors who appeared before him. According to Doughton, “these statistics are some evidence of potential discrimination,” but statistics alone are not enough to prove that Kenerly acted with the intent of discrimination.

The petition for relief, filed by Chambers’ attorneys, said that Kenerly also used different lines of questioning between white potential jurors and Black potential jurors. Kenerly struck Black potential jury member Lana Jones because he found it suspicious that she said she had not previously heard about such a notorious case in a small town and because she was under the age of 22 and had a short work history, which indicated a lack of stability to him. Kenerly passed white potential jury member Patricia Reese, who also said that she had no prior knowledge. The petition says that Kenerly also passed “numerous” potential jurors who were “young and white” or “unemployed and white.” The petition points to what Chambers’ attorneys called similar discrepancies with all six of the struck potential jurors.

Doughton, however, disagreed with the sentiment that the discrepancies pointed to a purposeful racial bias.

“To the extent any questioning appeared to be disparate, the differences arose from race neutral circumstances and were due to the information in responses he received on the various topics considered. This court concludes too that because even when disparate treatment does occur, error only exists where the result arose from motive to act with discriminatory purpose, no error arose here because even if DA Kenerly’s questioning had been disparate, it was not done with discriminatory purpose,” said Doughton in his ruling.

The notes, which pointed out the race of Black potential jurors but not any other potential jurors, were ruled not eligible in the trial because Barnes post-conviction attorneys had been able to obtain the note sometime in 1999 and Chambers’ attorneys knew about it a decade prior to the 2021 filing in question, which Doughton said meant it was not filed in a timely manner.

In a post released after the ruling, Chambers’ attorney Gretchen Engel said that she was devastated by the court’s ruling.

“Once again, I am confronted with the hard truth that North Carolina’s courts are often unwilling and unable to address racism in death penalty cases,” Engel said in the post.

Engel also said that Chambers and his legal team have resolved to not stop fighting. Engel’s filing noted that Chambers has filed another motion on the basis of his supposed intellectual disability which remains pending. The N.C. Coalition for Alternatives Against the Death Penalty’s profile of Chambers notes that his I.Q. scores have fluctuated between 63 and 73 and that a woman he lived with said he was unable to perform basic tasks such as hanging clothes on a line and that he could not be left alone for fear he would accidentally start a fire.