RALEIGH — North Carolina lawmakers gave initial approval Tuesday to a measure that would clear the way for executions to resume in the state.
The Republican-controlled House voted Tuesday to fully repeal a 4-year-old law that allows convicted murderers to get a death sentence reduced to life in prison if they can prove that race played a major role in their cases.
The bill has already passed the Senate. The provision repealing the Racial Justice Act has generated heated debate between opponents who say it simply delays justice and supporters who argued it acknowledges a proven problem in the state.
The state hasn’t carried out an execution since 2006 because of various legal appeals.
In addition to repealing what remains of a law passed by the Legislature when Democrats were in control, the measure would protect medical professionals from disciplinary action from licensing boards for assisting in an execution.
When first enacted under then-Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, the law allowed inmates to cite statistics in their appeals. However, Republicans who now control the legislature repealed that provision last session. A Cumberland County judge reduced the sentences of four convicted murderers on racial grounds last year, ruling on three of the cases after the rollback of the act.
The judge first cited a Michigan State study of North Carolina that found evidence of prosecutors striking black people from murder-trial juries at more than twice the rate of others between 1990 and 2010. When the Cumberland judge commuted the other sentences, he was relying on the prosecutor’s notes, which provided key anecdotal evidence that never saw the light of day before the act was in place, said Rep. Rick Glazier, D-Cumberland.
Glazier called on the chamber to wait until after the state Supreme Court has reviewed the Cumberland County case and another related to the Racial Justice Act before moving to declare it broken. The evidence that turned up even after multiple studies and the rollback of the law demands deeper consideration of the law’s intent, Glazier said.
“We remain in prison by the past as long as we continue to deny its existence, and if instead of accepting the consequence of what we did and hoping and ensuring it never happens again we just bury the evidence…we will never again have the confidence of our full society and the fairness and accuracy of the criminal justice system,” he said.
Rep. Paul Stam, R-Wake, said Democrats ignored warnings in 2009 that the law was flawed and would allow even white inmates to appeal their convictions from white juries. The law added another six years to a review process that includes some 45 judges on average, Stam said, and nearly all of the state’s 156 death-row inmates have appealed their sentences when plenty of avenues already exist.
“No one wants actual racial discrimination, but we also don’t want race to be used as a pretext to stop the death penalty,” Stam said.
He and other Republicans asserted repeatedly — as they have in the past — that the law is a way for Democrats with moral objections to capital punishment to put a de-facto freeze on its practice.
Democrats, particularly African-American members of the caucus, bristled at the suggestion.
Rep. Mickey Michaux, D-Durham, said the claims come from people who can’t fully appreciate racial prejudice, and a life sentence is no reprieve from punishment.
“RJA is not about the death penalty,” he said. “It is about an individual getting a free trial — a trial free of any prejudice at all.”
The bill passed 77-40, but Democrats objected to a final vote. The bill will likely return for a final vote in the House Wednesday.