Race is a critical factor in death penalty cases

Daily Times March 02, 2007

NORTH CAROLINA:

Race is critical factor in death penalty cases

A black man is more likely to be given the death penalty than a white man, a panel of law professors said Monday afternoon.

Speaking to a crowd of about 100 at a luncheon sponsored by N.C. Policy Watch and N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium of the state's death penalty, the panelists said statistics show that a black man is more likely to be sentenced to die for killing a white man, than a white man is for killing a black man.

Rep. Jean Farmer-Butterfield, a Wilson Democrat, has been a longtime proponent of a two-year moratorium on capital punishment in North Carolina. She said the issue is important to the Legislative Black Caucus, of which she's a member.

"I started working on this back in 1989, trying to get the state to change the way it administered the death penalty for mentally handicapped people and it took more than 10 years for that to change," said Farmer-Butterfield who works for the ARC of North Carolina.

"With the flaws that we're finding in the way the penalties are being handed down, we need to hold off and see what we need to do," she added.

Jack Boger, dean of the law school at the University of North Carolina said a statistical analysis of the death penalty conducted over a five year period in the 1990s indicate a racist trend in how the death penalty is applied. He said his study shows that the race of the victim matters.

"We have seen this pattern repeated too often over the decades," Boger said.

Elliott Cramer, a retired UNC statistics professor, said there's no doubt there's been a history of racial discrimination in capital cases. However, he criticized the statistics used in Boger's study. He said Boger didn't take black-on-black crime into account. Cramer said about 94 % of the murders in North Carolina over the past 25 years have been black-on-black which explains the higher number of black men who've been sentenced to death.

Charles Ogletree, a professor at the Harvard School of Law, attacked capital punishment directly. He said there is no way for the legal system to ensure fairness in sentencing and the complete competence of legal representation when someone's life is hanging in the balance.

Ogletree said there are too many instances of incompetent legal representation, legal malfeasance or flat out racism in the courtrooms when a minority is on trial for committing a capital crime. He said the problems in the courtroom seem to become more pronounced if the victim is Caucasian.

"We are seeing error after error in passing down the death penalty. We shouldn't have a system where in any way a person's race should determine who should live and who should die," Ogletree said.

Ogletree said his sister, a California police officer, was murdered in 1983. And although the crime has never been solved, he said his family would not want to see the killer put to death. Ogletree said he's hoping North Carolina will join with other states that have either abolished capital punishment or put it on hold to study how it's administered.

N.C. Rep. Deborah Ross, D-Wake, said the state is under a de facto moratorium since the administration of the lethal injection is being questioned in court. She told the crowd that if they want to see the death penalty abolished in North Carolina, then activists will have to change public opinion.

Ross, a civil rights attorney, said the opinion of the entire state wouldn't have to change, only about 6 or 10 rural areas that strongly support the death penalty. She said if constituents in those counties, which she didn't name, could be swayed, then the balance in the legislature would tip to favor a 2-year ban on executions in North Carolina.
Source: Daily Times