The House of Representatives committee appointed to see if a compromise to the Racial Justice Act can be crafted held its first meeting today, with Democrats questioning why it was happening and the usual lineup of pro and con speakers restating their opinions.
House Speaker Joe Hackney, an Orange County Democrat, pointed out the RJA is already law and the first case is being heard in court, “which would make this meeting today pretty much unprecedented,” Hackney said. “It seems to me this issue ought to be benched,” he added.
Chairman Rep. Tim Moore, a Republican representing Cleveland County, said the point was to see if the committee could come up with a concensus bill to present in the short session in May.
First up was Wake County’s chief prosecutor, Colon Willoughby, representing the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, who said the two-year-old law’s reliance on statistics to prove racial bias was too broad.
Hackney asked Willoughby if he thought there was a problem with the fact that there’s almost never a death-penalty case in Orange County while there frequently is in some other counties, simply because the make-up of the population differs. “You don’t think we should do anything about that?” Hackney said.
“We should educate the population of Orange County,” Willoughby said. “You’re out of touch with other folks.”
Later in the hearing, Majority Leader Paul “Skip” Stam, a Republican from Apex, suggested one compromise might be doing away with the peremptory challenges that prosecutors and defense attorneys have allowing them to reject potential jurors without having to give a reason.
Stam also asked Ken Rose, a senior attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, how long it will be before the claims filed under the Racial Justice Act are resolved in court. Rose said he expects the first test case under way now in Cumberland County to be appealed within the next year. It will end up in the state Supreme Court, he said, and once the court rules then many of the other pending cases will start to be settled.
Prosecutors and Republicans in the General Assembly want to see the Racial Justice Act repealed. They did not have enough votes to override the governor's veto of a bill that would have accomplished that.
Some conservative Democrats were interested in addressing prosecutors' concerns, but also in preserving the intent of the law -- to ensure murder prosecutions are free of racial bias, or to impose a permanent moratorium on the death penalty, depending on how you view it. So House Speaker Thom Tillis appointed the House Select Committee on Racial Discrimination in Capital Cases to explore potential compromises.
