Debate capital punishment

Editorial by Greenville Daily Reflector, July 31, 2013.

When the General Assembly’s Democratic majority passed the Racial Justice Act in 2009, supporters claimed it would address legitimate concerns about the prevalence of bias in capital cases. In practice, however, the legislation served to extend North Carolina’s moratorium on the death penalty that had been in place since 2006.

This year’s repeal of the Racial Justice Act by a Republican legislative majority, with the complicit backing of Gov. Pat McCrory, removed from the state cannon a flawed approach to a serious public issue. However, by avoiding a debate about the larger question — the propriety of using capital punishment in North Carolina — the outcome falls short of what citizens deserve.

According to the Department of Public Safety, 152 inmates sit on death row in North Carolina, men and women convicted of the worst offenses and sentenced to the state’s most severe punishment. However, seven years have passed since officials at Central Prison in Raleigh executed Samuel Russell Flippen by lethal injection for the murder of his 2-year-old stepdaughter.

Since then, a variety of legislative and legal entanglements have put the death penalty on hold in North Carolina. Challenges to the constitutionality of the state’s execution method were followed by concerns about fairness in the post-conviction appeals process. Some lawmakers repeatedly attempted to impose a capital punishment moratorium to study the procedure.

In 2009, Democratic leadership passed the Racial Justice Act, affording the condemned a chance to prove racial bias in the judicial process. While that attempted to address ample evidence of racial discrimination in charging, sentencing and juror selection decisions, the legislation instead led to appeals from nearly every inmate on death row, regardless of race.

Republicans, now in control of Raleigh, successfully targeted the act for repeal this session. That action helped to erase a mistake, but commencing executions again, as some lawmakers desire, may not be the proper path, nor one that reflects the public will.

North Carolina knows that juries have, on several occasions, convicted the innocent and sentenced them to death. And opinion polls show residents would rather see the worst offenders receive life in jail without parole rather than death.

What the state therefore needs is a serious debate about the propriety of capital punishment here. Both sides have failed with half-measures that do not confront the larger concerns about death sentences and the process by which they are handed down. It is time that issue — not peripheral arguments — takes center stage.