Beverly Perdue has apologized for a remark on the death penalty.

As a state senator, Perdue opposed a bill to phase out the gas chamber in state executions, according to a March 23, 1995, story in the Charlotte Observer:

Another death penalty backer, Sen. Beverly Perdue, D-Craven, suggested that doing away with the gas chamber would lessen capital punishment's deterrent value.

"I think we should make it painful and torturous," she said.

When the comment came up in a discussion on the liberal Web site BlueNC, Perdue logged on and apologized.

"I made that quote more than a decade ago, and I'm sorry," she wrote this afternoon. "I know that we must make sure that innocent people are not on death row and that's why I favor the current moratorium."

A moratorium bill didn't get any traction today, but death penalty opponents were still celebrating.

That's because two other bills that did pass the House would help death row inmates, Andrea Weigl reports.

The N.C. Racial Justice Act would allow death row inmates to use statistics to try to prove prosecutors sought the death penalty against them because of their race.

And a proportionality review bill would allow the state Supreme Court to compare their appeals with other cases in which the defendant was given a life sentence.

Currently, when the state Supreme Court reviews death row inmates' appeals, it evaluates whether the sentence was fair in comparison to other cases in which the defendant received death.

But the bill would only allow an expanded review when the defendant was convicted of felony murder, where a killing occurs during another crime. A classic example of felony murder is when a clerk is killed during a convenience store robbery.