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Supporters of the Racial Justice Act mounted an offensive Wednesday in hopes of beating back this session’s attempt to wipe the Act off the books and resume executions.

On Wednesday morning, a House judiciary subcommittee took public input on SB306, which has passed the Senate and will be voted on in the subcommittee next week. Afterward, RJA supporters – including about a dozen legislators, two lawyers, a doctor and a relative of a murder victim – gathered for the news conference.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Thom Goolsby, a Republican from Wilmington, would repeal the Racial Justice Act; allow doctors, nurses and pharmacists to participate in executions without retribution from licensing boards; and speed up the process leading to executions.

The NAACP is taking issue with a Fayetteville legislator's remarks on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday during the debate over repealing the Racial Justice Act.

Republican Sen. Wesley Meredith argued that Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks should have recused himself from hearing claims filed under the RJA because he had presided over some of the cases earlier. Meredith asked "why do we need a minority judge who knew the case?"

Weeks is black. The argument was not about the judge's race, but whether people convicted of capital murder should have their sentences converted to life in prison without parole if there was racial prejudice in their trial. However, prosecutors fought hard to stop the first RJA cases before they went to Weeks, and then tried to have him removed from the hearings.

Rev. William Barber issued a news release calling Meredith's remark offensive.

At the end of Wednesday's debate, Sen. Dan Blue, a Raleigh Democrat who is African-American, spoke on the floor in defense of Weeks, adding that he was sure Meredith didn't intend to disparage the judge.

Death penalty opponents are planning a news conference to muster opposition to legislation that would repeal the Racial Justice Act and resume executions.

North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty will gather with sympathetic lawmakers and people whose relatives have been murdered. The news conference will be Wednesday in the statehouse.

Earlier this month, a repeal bill backed by the Senate leadership – SB306 – was the subject of a news conference by its primary sponsor, Sen. Thom Goolsby, a Republican from Wilmington.

The 2009 Racial Justice Act allowed convicted murderers to petition to have their sentences reduced to life in prison by using statistics to prove racial bias in their trials. Last session, the General Assembly gutted the law by severely restricting how statistics can be used.

This bill would do away with the RJA altogether. Supporters of the original law say the statistics demonstrate flaws in the state’s capital punishment system.

In reaction to Republican senators filing a bill that on Wednesday that would repeal the Racial Justice Act, 73 professors from across North Carolina have signed a statement urging legislators to leave the capital punishment law intact.

“If this bill is enacted, North Carolina would become, in the eyes of the nation, the state that was presented with clear evidence of racial bias in capital sentencing and chose to look away,” the statement reads. “Our lawmakers should work to eliminate the role of race in the death penalty, rather than repealing the law that uncovered the problem.”

The Democrat-controlled General Assembly passed the Racial Justice Act in 2009, permitting the use of statistics to challenge death sentences. A judge would have to be convinced that there was racial bias in the prosecution, jury selection or sentencing, and then could reduce the sentence to life in prison without parole.

Resurrecting last session’s bruising battle over the death penalty in North Carolina, a Republican state senator on Wednesday filed a bill to wipe all traces of the Racial Justice Act off the books.

The 2009 law allowed statistics compiled statewide to be used to prove racial bias in the prosecution, jury selection or sentencing in capital cases. But prosecutors and Republican legislators contended the law was a smokescreen to prevent all executions by using broad statistics that didn’t have anything to do with individual cases.

A Cumberland County judge has converted three death sentences to life in prison in a Racial Justice Act ruling.

Alzheimer's patients on Medicaid in special housing might see their federal payments cut below the limit where the facilities can no longer afford to care for them.

Gov.-elect Pat McCrory names secretaries of Health and Human Services and of Environment and Natural Resources, and a chief of staff. All are fresh faces in state government, but well-known in Repbulican circles.

Mayors from the state's biggest cities got together to chart out a common course for the next legislative session.

John Hood of the Locke Foundation writes that the legislature's rewrite of the the Racial Justice Act was a major blow to death penalty opponents. “The Racial Justice Act was just the latest in a series of initiatives used by death-penalty foes to maintain a de facto moratorium on executions in North Carolina, as nearly every death row inmate had filed RJA claims to convert their sentences to life in prison,” Hood writes in his weekly column for the Locke Foundation.

“The newly rewritten RJA, however, is no longer so easy to abuse,'' he writes. “Rather than use old or irrelevant data to assert racial bias in sentencing, murderers on death row now have to cite recent statistics from the counties or prosecutorial districts where their sentences were imposed as well as other evidence directly related to the handling of their cases.' For more read here.

No congressional candidate in the country has dug deeper into his own pocket than Republican Robert Pittenger in North Carolina’s 9th District, according to campaign reports filed Thursday.

Pittenger gave his campaign more than $1.9 million through June 27. That helped the Charlotte real estate investor collect seven times as much as GOP rival Jim Pendergraph, a Mecklenburg County commissioner and former sheriff. More here.

More political headlines:

--Four death row inmates have challenged the changes made this summer to the state’s Racial Justice Act. In court documents filed in Cumberland County, Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin, Jeffery Meyer and Christina Walters are seeking to have their cases heard using the 2009 law, a request that could launch a legal review of a legislative overhaul of the law this summer.

UPDATED: The state Senate and House on Monday overrode Gov. Bev Perdue's veto of the bill rewriting the Racial Justice Act, meaning it becomes law.

The 31-11 Senate vote came after a 15-minute debate that covered familiar ground. The House later voted 72-48, just enough to meet the three-fifths majority required.

In the closing days of the legislative session, House Speaker Thom Tillis staked a claim on the state’s sputtering economy, even though his party blames Democrats for the current situation.

“This is our economy,” Tillis said. “I am fully confident. I want to own this economy. It is our responsibility. We did a good job of starting, and we’ve got a lot of unraveling to do of bad policies that have hamstrung us that cannot be undone overnight.” 

But the GOP record on the economy remains debatable, especially in a rural county that needs jobs. Read more here.

More political headlines:

--Get a scorecard from the Republican-controlled two-year legislative session here.