Perdue signs Racial Justice Act

P= pretty
E=educated
R=ready
D=democrat
U=UNDER INFLUENCE OF
E=NEXT ELECTIONS

O=OFFERING
B=black americans
A=and
M=majorities
A=assitants for more authority

Once again the laws being passed do nothing for the victims bc the state is scared to put their money where they might not reap the benefits. They can prosecute off of our tax money with state attorneys,turn around, let them out and let our tax money pay for minimum wage probation officers to allow them to go through the whole process again with our tax money. Then we have them on death row with multiple felonies and they want to blame race. If there is any question of race problems on death row when most there have rap sheets a mile long before they get there, why don't the NAACP set them up an appointment with the President to work it out over a beer!!! I am sure our Governor would be honored to go to the White House or even have the PRESIDENT COME TO OUR FINE PRISONS. Obama and Purdue could set down in the prisons and discuss this with all of them. I am sure there are many prisoners that would love a beer and maybe could share a lot of racial stories with them. Then once we get that all squared away we could elect some repubicans to listen to the victims about how they have been discriminated against. The victims would settle for sharing a dollar pepsi or coke while discussing the issues, I'm sure. That would be a lot of savings right there bc there would be many victims in comparison to race victims or would it, considering a lot of the victims are families of drive by shootings and gang related crimes. Oh, what am I thinking the crimnals with these offensense are not on death row they are on probation. Oh well they may still enjoy a beer with Obama and Perdue to discuss why they are where they are.

This race thing is getting very old. I wish we could call it something else, thereby creating a whole new occupation for many. All politicians in trouble always reach down and drag it up, dust it off, and claim it as their cause. It is the one item in the bag that our leaders surely hope never goes away since they are certain to gain points just by using the word. They keep the race relations a subject just like scholars and preachers do by keeping it in the bag. She is trying hard yet she knows, next year is an election year for her team, and with their record this year, they have to start playing all the cards they have.

Balance of justice, unbalanced with this law.

Statistics can only be used to void application of a death penalty. They cannot be used to justify the application of it.

Keep 'em coming. This is entertaining.

This is based upon another fallacy. People who are ill-read and ill-educated often think in fallacies, to wit: There are more blacks in prison than whites; therefore, jailing procedures are unfair. Circular cause and consequence.
The fact is imprisonment is NOT based upon race, or any other demographic: IT IS BASED UPON THE COMMISSION OF CRIMES. More blacks commit crimes; THEREFORE, more blacks go to prison. Their race has NOTHING to do with incarceration. EVER.

What a pile of crap. If a black person kills somebody, his victim is dead whether race figures in to the case or not.

...the NAACP may be supporting Purdue next election.... ???

NO WAY .... can't believe that! ..... When's the last time a black organization dared to support a Democrat. After all that the Dems have done for them with that Great Society Thingy back in 1965.

How's that working out by the way. Another 6-8 decades it oughta kick in, don't cha think ???

Patricia8 has a point.

I do hate prejudices but the Democrats like her are causing them!

The only sense I can make of such a stupid law is that the NAACP may be supporting Purdue next election. I don't think that will work though bc I believe her supporters are even sick of her. These Democrats pretend to be so non-racial but they are the most racial to the whites, only thinking of themselves for more votes. When will the minority realize they are using them for self gratification and votes. They don't care about whites or blacks, just #1. The Democrats are keeping racism alive in our country for selfworth when all races are willing to put it behind them and move on to a better America. It's the person we are dealing with that should be judged not the color and we all have enough common sense to know that. Once again I say this law she had passed is just for the benefit of a few in office. If I or my family has been offended by someone I could care less what color they are I would want them to pay in the same manner. I don't think there is any other American that doesn't feel the same. It is time they all stop this race nonsense and act with commonsense when they get elected to office. Every person on death row is going to be arguing race is why they are there now and it's going to be more money for state appointed lawyers. Sad news is the white person arguing has no arguement in her law, now how is this fair? I do hate prejudices but the Democrats like her are causing them! We are all God's children separated by good and evil and until we start acting that way and believing that way our lives will be controlled by politicians and their selfish ideas to gain power.

Those white guys raymond1 and ProwlingWoofie have a point.

Wake up, people, before the Democrats take everything you own...

If we can't murder innocent people just because they're black, what's the point in being white?

(Continued from below)
I do not ignore the pain that family members will experience with additional court actions. As we learned in law school, though, hard cases make bad law. While I sympathize with the additional pain, that pain is no reason to ignore a right to question whether Due Process and Equal Protection was applied in these most extreme cases with absolute consequences.

Finally, to the future costs of unrequited crime. As you know, there is no such thing as a prospective statistic. I do not believe a single major felony will go unprosecuted as a result of this Act, however. I am confident Justice Department managers will allocate resources to find and prosecute the worst of the worst, as it has always been.

Now, how many petty crimes might go unprosecuted? That is a fair question, but I must respectfully suggest you’ve overstated the risks of unprosecuted crimes and of time-costs these hearings will hang on law enforcement. Police and prosecutors involved in these matters as witnesses will lose a few hours, or even a couple of days, to prep and testimony, yes, but they will not be engaged in this process for full-time weeks on end. They will prepare then go back to work, then they will testify and go back to work. The interruption to work will more likely be de minimis, and coverable by others in the office (much as public defenders must operate in these budget-cutting days). Certainly if good cause exists, like harm to an investigation if a hearing goes on X date, we both know that State court continuances (maybe even ex parte) are not hard to get.

Moreover, as we both know, an efficient office with three to four experienced lawyers – both State and defense – and double that many paralegals and investigators could quickly have general responses to these 163 claims. Inmate claims will surely rely on many of the same legal and statistical citations, because there is only so much data out there, and in short order the death-heavy jurisdictions will have their own statistics in a neatly-bound report. This then leaves a lot of cut-and-paste briefing available to attorneys at both tables.

I will bet cash that, by the tenth hearing, State replies and sur-replies will have effective templates, and the major time-cost will be the fact investigation. By the twentieth hearing process, I suspect there will be reported court decisions that further limit defendants’ claims – including, perhaps, prima facie showings to survive dismissal as the hearing begins (as you note, who knows how some of the statute’s language will be interpreted). Should we get to a hundredth hearing, it will be as pro forma as any ineffective assistance of counsel collateral challenge today. I wonder whether there will be a hundred challenges of 163, though, and I will again bet cash that we will not see all 163 death rowers make the challenge. We will know one year from the statute’s effective date, though, and then the up-front cost will be all but over.

I will close with a general comment. Those posters who focus on this Act being a boon for blacks and a bane to white killers, you may be illustrating the very inherent bias that makes this Act necessary. It applies to ALL races, including Caucasian death rowers. This Act is not politically correct. It is constitutionally correct.

I first clarify, NCProsecutor, that I was actually asking whether you had NC prosecution costs on-hand, since I’d have to find them. While you might at times read my posts and say “what an a**,” there won’t be any passive to that aggressive. When it seems like a snide comment, odds are I just poorly phrased something.

Now, the financial burdens are EXACTLY one point I made, in counter-point to your comment, that death prosecutions are expensive acts of vengeance that could be more cost-effectively addressed as Life Without Parole prosecutions. It was much less a rhetorical device (though thanks for the prop) than one of my several substantive arguments against State-sponsored executions. The costs of our entire criminal justice philosophy is on the edge of bankrupting us as a nation – meant fiscally, forget the human costs for the moment – and we as a people MUST decide whether vengeance is really worth the enormous financial burden that follows a death versus life-without prosecution.

We must also decide whether we have over-criminalized daily life since the 1980s, meaning there are just more crimes on the books than there really needs to be. I have grave doubts that we are a more criminal people than the Russians or Chinese, and yet we have more persons per capita under sentence than either of those nations. Certainly we need to re-consider whether every crime requires prosecution to imprisonment, or whether a good deal of our petty offenses (for example, drugs possession to some street-level trafficking) might be better handled as NC is stepping toward – expanded drug courts and treatment options, with prison prosecution as a LAST resort, not a mandatory minimum.

When I spoke of “up-front” costs, I didn’t mean the pre-trial hearing that will become part and parcel of future death defenses. Like you, I was speaking about the current death row inmates who are eligible for this retroactive challenge. Yes, these up-front 163 causes of action will be a burden. That justice is expensive, however, is no reason to cut corners on constitutional protections (including the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, due process and equal protection guarantees notwithstanding race). As a plurality Supreme Court held in 1957:

“The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and if allowed to flourish would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our government.”

Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1, 14 (1957).

Ok, so by writing, rubber stamping this law, is this part of the reparations nonsense? Really? Come on, how much guilt is too much guilt.

i guess if your white you just stay on death row. how do you know if race plays a factor. it's just a way for blacks to get of death row.

You keep voting Democrats in, and you keep getting this type of b.s. passed into law.

Wake up, people, before the Democrats take everything you own...

By all means, let's protect those that have earned a death sentence by their actions against society !

Sweetsea......I believe they are already using this convoluted system to carry out death penalties in North Carolina and have been doing it for years. Even though blacks are 8 times more likely to commit a capital crime, North Carolina executes far more whites than blacks. The Freedom of Information Act will get you the information to bear this out. When the death penalty was reinstated it took them forever before a black was executed....even a white grandmother took the dirt nap early on. I don't think NC politicians are willing to take the heat from perhaps executing death row inmates in the order they were sentenced. Ever visited a prison? At one time, my job took me inside the walls of Central prison on a regular basis. The makeup in racial ratio of blacks and whites is a real eye opener. I don't think the democrats in this state want to upset their voting base....or maybe they were all framed. If blacks were to make up only 50% of the inmates on death row, then at least every other executed inmate should be black. It won't get any better until we root out these old entrenched NC democrat politicians and judges and and the honchos they've appointed who run the system .

Get your Wallets out folks, your going to start paying even more for community sensitivities and fairness to others in your near community who will no doubt continue on their rampage of crime and murder and will continue to expect someone else to pay for it (that's the law abiding, working folks in the country)

Thanks Gov Bubbles for yet another stunning bs law you signed into effect to further stiffin the average person's basic rights to safety and happiness where they live.

This empowers african gangs and thugs.

Oh, what the Act should also say: "Please vote these jokers out of office the next chance you get!"

What the act should really say: "Two white dudes must be put to death for every minority who is executed."

We already have a MANDATORY proportionality review for whether the particular offense was deserving of the death penalty compared to how this punishment was meted out in previous cases. One can imagine this already effectuates some part of what the new act purports to accomplish.

Honestly, though, there is really no accounting for a jury's judgment or potential biases. It goes with the territory of having an entitlement to a trial by jury. Jurors could generally hate bald guys, for all we know. But there are already measures in place to prevent race-based selection of jurors, which would presumably account for "racial justice" by promoting a jury which represents a cross-section of society.

Any way you slice this, it's a terrible law. Even if it's well-intentioned, does anyone truly believe it will accomplish anything except to give (anti-death penalty) judges the ability to vacate death sentences at will on the basis of contrived stats?

That's a very clever rhetorical device, Mr. Hurst, but I'm not talking about the prosecution of a capital case versus a non-capital case, as you well know. I'm not even talking about the new up-front hearing that will now be held before every capital prosecution as a result of the Act. I'm talking about the fact that the Act creates a brand new cause of action which is now available to all 163 occupants of death row in North Carolina. The retroactive application of the Act poses a crushing financial burden on both local prosecutors and state attorneys general (not to mention the pain of the victims' families) which you happily brush aside as mere "[e]xpedience" and "some additional cost." Furthermore, you blissfully ignore the opportunity costs associated with causes of action under the Act -- in other words, the important criminal justice and public safety work that will *not* be performed by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and attorneys for the Department of Justice because our General Assembly granted death row inmates yet *another* layer of review of their sentences.

Mr. Hurst, do you happen to have the statistics on hand for the number of crimes that will go unpunished because the public servants responsible for holding offenders accountable will instead be diligently laboring to respond to the 163 causes of action created by the Act?

Expedience is no reason to deny reasonable investigations into whether our State's agents try to kill its prisoners on a racial slant. Yes, there will be some additional cost in the front end, while old claims are resolved, but after the death row cases process, it will become a part of regular practice and no one will be any more put out than for any other part of a death prosecution.

If we are really that worried about the enormous costs of death prosecutions, then perhaps we should consider Life sentences instead. Even keeping an inmate forty years in prison is less expensive than death penalty prosecution (and defense), as NC AOC costs-of-incarceration data versus the Atlanta shooter's case (millions spent on that death prosecution) tends to show.

NCProsecutor, do you by chance have the average-cost figures on hand for death versus non-death prosecutions?

If the "unvarnished truth" below is really truth, we would like to see your citations to reputable evidence - crime reports, DOJ annual crime statistics, or even testimonial evidence from law enforcement and criminal justice professionals. If this is just bold supposition without evidence - evidence - to support it, then it is EXACTLY the kind of unsupported attitude that will be tested by the Act - and itself proves the need for the Act.

By the by, those "rights for murderers" are actually called the Bill of Rights, and it was our Forefathers' original intent that EVERY American get their protections, whether we all like it or not. To live without them is to live in the very tyranny our Founders wrote the Constitution to prevent.

WHAT A CROCK !

The Act says:

"A finding that race was the basis of the decision to seek or impose a death sentence may be established if the court finds that race was a significant factor in decisions to seek or impose the sentence of death..."

Does anyone know what "a significant factor" is? The Act doesn't define that term. Later, the Act says that one type of evidence that would be relevant to such finding is testimony that "[d]eath sentences were sought or imposed significantly more frequently upon persons of one race than upon persons of another race." Does anyone know what "significantly more frequently" means? The Act doesn't define that term, either. The Act also says nothing about how much evidence will be sufficient in order to meet a defendant's burden to show that race was "a significant factor" in his or her death sentence.

These definitional issues only scratch the surface of the Act's problems. Each of the 163 inmates on North Carolina's death row will now be entitled to file an individual claim in the superior court where they were convicted and sentenced alleging that their death sentence was obtained on the basis of race. Nearly all of them are indigent and will need to be appointed appellate counsel at taxpayer expense. How many different statistical experts will need to be paid for by the citizens of North Carolina in order to assist death row inmates and their lawyers in making claims under the Act? How many current and former elected district attorneys, assistant district attorneys, legal assistants, and law enforcement officers will need to be subpoenaed to testify in hearings all over the state? How many former jurors in death penalty cases will be hauled back to court to testify about their reasons for voting to send each of these defendants to death? How many of these jurors' family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, ex-spouses, and acquaintances will be called to testify about any racially insensitive comment ever made by or in the presence of those jurors?

In addition, how will the State possibly be able to defend all 163 of these claims in a timely and professional manner? The State will need to hire its own statistical experts at considerable expense. Given the inevitable need for prosecutors to testify about their motivations for seeking the death penalty in each case, attorneys from the Attorney General's Office will almost certainly be required to litigate the overwhelming majority of these hearings, and the recently-passed state budget did nothing to provide the Department of Justice with the significant resources necessary to meet that daunting burden (in fact, the agency's budget was cut).

Of course, these logistical issues pale in comparison to the anguish of the families of the victims in each of the 163 murder cases which gave rise to these death sentences. These families have waited for many years for some sort of closure, and this Act prolongs their agony even as it reopens these old wounds.

The Act may have been well-intentioned, but it poses significant challenges to the criminal justice system, and the financial and human costs of complying with the Act are neither widely known by the public nor fully understood by the General Assembly or the Governor. And yet somehow the Act is now the law of the land. God bless the Great State of North Carolina.

"This is politically correct garbage and more rights for murderers. Blacks are eight times more likely than whites to commit murder. When they kill whites it is usually during a rape or robbery and the victims are usually innocent for the most part whereas they generally kill one another during drug trade activity, gang turf battles, at parties or just street thuggery. Not always but generally. Unless you take the above into account, which is the unvarnished truth, those deserving the death penalty will escape justice just because of race. You have to consider each case on it's merits. Cases where a black kid kills a white kid in a drug deal gone bad...no death penalty warranted. In the case of Eve Carson and the Duke graduate student, fry em! Perdue ain't worth squat!

As I understand it, the analysis will be on the death cases prosecuted in that jurisdiction, sometimes as opposed to other jurisdictions and Statewide. Things compared will include, as examples: (1) how often various races got notices of intent to seek death for similar fact patterns; (2) how often death penalties were imposed against different races under similar facts; (3) how race was used at trial, for instance in how the prosecutor used his/her strikes to get one race or another off the jury panel; and (4) how often the victims of various races resulted in death prosecutions, and death penalties. Importantly, this applies to ALL races, and the burden of proof is on the defendant.

The Act's text is short and fairly clear, at http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2009/Bills/Senate/HTML/S461v6.html.

How is a judge going to determine that race was a factor? If a death row inmate's race is X and race X is 25% of the population then if death row inmates of race X is greater than 25% that translates into an "unfair" use of the death penalty? Someone explain this, please.