Death penalty bill provokes a battle
Measure moves in fractious House
BY MICHAEL BIESECKER - Staff Writer
http://www.newsobserver.com/politics/story/1607948.htmlPublished: Wed, Jul. 15, 2009 06:31AMModified Tue, Jul. 14, 2009
RALEIGH -- Judges would be allowed to consider whether racial bias played a role in the decision to seek or impose the death penalty, according to a bill on which the N.C. House voted Tuesday evening after a long and emotionally charged debate.
"This is a fairness bill," said Rep. Larry Womble, the Forsyth Democrat who helped champion the bill. "If we're going to kill people, we must be as fair and objective as we can. This allows one more chance for justice to be blind. ... It's not a get-out-of-jail free card for anybody."
Democrats cited studies showing blacks are far more likely to be sentenced to death in North Carolina than whites. Further, a defendant is 3.5 times more likely to face the death penalty when the victim is white than when the victim is black.
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Republicans strongly oppose the measure, saying its passage will clog the courts with frivolous appeals, cost millions and impose a de facto moratorium on executions.
"This bill is not really about race," said Rep. Paul Stam of Wake County, the minority leader. "It's about the death penalty."
The N.C. Racial Justice Act passed its second reading in the House 61-55, with every Republican and four Democrats voting no.
A final House vote could come today, and the bill would then return to the Senate, where it may have a difficult time gaining approval and may require a compromise. That's because the House version left out a section of the Senate bill designed to help remove obstacles that have effectively halted executions for two years. Senate leaders said that provision must be included for the Racial Justice Act to pass that chamber.
Still, supporters rejoiced in Tuesday's vote, which they saw as a signal that the Democrat-controlled legislature might approve the bill.
Similar versions of the legislation had failed in past years in the face of opposition from the majority of the state's sheriffs and district attorneys.
On Tuesday, Rep. Dan Ingle, a Republican from Alamance County and former law enforcement officer, dramatically threw a thick law book into his waste basket to illustrate that approving the bill would be the equivalent of trashing the state's criminal code.
Several GOP members specifically objected to a provision in the bill that would allow a defendant to introduce statistical evidence showing people of their race disproportionally face the death penalty in a particular area.
Stam read an e-mail from Locke Bell, a prosecutor in Gaston County, who said that only one black man was on death row from his district, while all the rest were white. If the law were approved, the prosecutor complained, white defendants could make a good case they were being discriminated against.
"I would have to seek execution of more black men to balance things out," Locke wrote.
Stam, a lawyer, attempted to make the same point using gender, saying that men are proportionally far more likely to face the death penalty than women and suggesting more women be killed for the sake of fairness.
He also raised concerns about the bill being retroactive, which would allow current death row inmates to appeal convictions that may have occurred decades ago.
Time after time during the more than two and a half hours of debate, Democrats rose in rebuttal.
Rep. Bill Faison, a Democrat from Orange County, said that Bell had either not read the actual bill or was too "simple" to understand statistics.
Rep. Hugh Holliman of Davidson County, the majority leader, held himself up as proof that a legislator could be both a strong proponent of the death penalty and a supporter of the Racial Justice Act. He didn't need to remind the other members that his daughter, Susie, was a murder victim and that her killer, Ricky Lee Sanderson, was executed in the death chamber at Raleigh's Central Prison in 1998.
