Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Cassandra Stubbs, Capital Punishment Project
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Posts by Cassandra Stubbs, Capital Punishment Project
The Truth About the Racial Justice Act
02 months ago
On August 10, 2009, the North Carolina Legislature passed a historic piece of civil rights legislation, the North Carolina Racial Justice Act (RJA), which was intended to reform racial discrimination in that state’s death penalty cases. This week, the North Carolina Legislature repealed the very same legislation.
The law was intended to prevent the execution of people based on racial bias in jury selection and prosecuting and sentencing decisions in capital cases. It would allow death row inmates to bring challenges to their death sentences based on statistics showing that racial bias was a factor at the time of their trial. If an inmate was able to show that, his or her death sentence would be converted to life in prison without parole.
Shortly after the RJA was passed, researchers from Michigan State University conducted a sweeping study of North Carolina capital cases and found discrimination statewide. From the west to the east, in cities and in rural counties, and in cases with black and white defendants alike, prosecutors overwhelmingly discriminated against qualified African-American citizens during jury selection, rejecting qualified African-American jurors at a far greater rate than qualified white jurors.
Based largely on the evidence showing widespread discrimination statewide, the vast majority of North Carolina death row inmates promptly filed claims under the RJA. With two of these cases headed for hearing in early 2012, North Carolina prosecutors lobbied the legislature to repeal the RJA based on a series of misrepresentations about the law. Unfortunately, on November 28, 2011, the Senate responded and passed SB 9, a bill to repeal the RJA. The future of this civil rights law is now in the hands of Gov. Beverly Perdue, who has the opportunity to veto the repeal legislation.
Today, the ACLU and the ACLU of North Carolina sent a letter to Gov. Perdue urging her to veto the legislation and leave the RJA intact.
The large number of claims filed — and the mass of evidence of discrimination uncovered by defendants — underscores the need for the law, not its repeal. When the evidence shows that prosecutors in almost every county in North Carolina are striking qualified African-American citizens from jury service based on their race, it is clear that our juridical system needs reform.
As North Carolina well knows, few civil rights laws have been implemented without resistance. Change is hard — undoubtedly prosecutors would like to keep their jury selection practices intact, even if they have discriminatory results. But the citizens of North Carolina are owed more. Gov. Perdue should veto the repeal law and protect North Carolina citizens from more discrimination.
If you live in North Carolina, you can help. Go here to urge Gov. Perdue to save the Racial Justice Act by vetoing SB 9. And if you live anywhere else, go here to find out what you can do to help end the discriminatory death penalty in your state.
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New "Fast Track" Death Appeal Rules Still Fall Far Short of Goal of Providing Quality Counsel
07 months ago
One familiar argument in the debate about the death penalty goes something like this: supporters of capital punishment say "defense attorneys just try to delay executions with endless appeals."
Opponents of the death penalty reply: "Give defendants quality lawyers — with reasonable caseloads and adequate resources and adequate compensation — and there won’t be so much delay."
Under two Congressional statutes, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1995 and the Patriot Reauthorization, Congress tried to make a new bargain with death penalty states. If the states would give quality representation to death row defendants in state post-conviction proceedings, then the states could qualify for "fast track," abridged federal court review that could significantly expedite executions.
Congress charged the executive branch with the responsibility of implementing rules for this process. The first regulations, proposed by the Bush administration, were seriously flawed. The ACLU, along with numerous otherganizations and officials, filed comments objecting to those procedures, ultimately resulting in the withdrawal of those regulations.
The Obama administration has now released new proposed regulations that still fail to address some of the most pressing problems with the quality of counsel in state post-conviction proceedings. On June 1, 2011, the ACLU submitted comments to these proposed rules.
As Attorney General Eric Holder has publicly acknowledged), inadequate funding and high caseloads are some of the most serious barriers to providing quality legal representation in death penalty cases. In our comments, we point out that regulations proposed by the Obama Administration fail to overcome either of these serious problems.
Until these regulations properly address excessive caseloads and adequate compensation for lawyers in these cases, no state should be able to claim it passes the test of effective counsel qualify for the fast-track federal review.
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When Junk Science is a Life-or-Death Matter
08 months ago
Yesterday, three different groups asked the Supreme Court to step in and restore fairness and reliability to death penalty trials involving so-called "expert" testimony about future dangerousness. For Texas juries, the "future danger" issue determines whether a defendant lives dies: before the jury can return a death verdict, it must find that the defendant would pose a future danger if not executed.
The groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the Supreme Court to hear a case that centers on the discredited testimony of psychiatrist Dr. Richard Coons in the sentencing trial of Billie Wayne Coble. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Coble, who had served almost 20 years on death row while his case was on appeal before he won a new sentencing trial. At the new sentencing trial, Dr. Coons told the jury that Coble was likely to pose a future danger even though Coble had an unblemished prison record: He had never received a single disciplinary write-up and was described by all as a positive contributor in prison.
This disconnect only make sense when the scientific bases for Dr. Coon’s testimony are examined. It turns out he didn’t have any. Dr. Coons could not cite a single article book supporting his own subjective, idiosyncratic approach to deciding future dangerousness. He was unaware of the relevant body of literature discussing dangerousness risk assessments.
Unfortunately, Dr. Coons’s testimony in Coble’s case is far from unique. The brief filed yesterday by Texas mental healthganizations points out that Dr. Coons has testified in scores of capital cases, and he is only one of a small army of state psychiatrists and psychologists who turn up in court regularly to present their own unscientific, unfair opinions dressed-up as expert testimony. Perhaps the most famous of the bunch, Dr. Grigson, a.k.a. "Dr. Death," was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association.
For defendants facing the death penalty, the admission of this unreliable and unfair testimony is often deadly. As the brief filed by the American Psychological Association describes, juries are often more likely to credit this unfair and unscientific "expert" testimony precisely because it comes from doctors, whom juries are far more likely to trust.
In Coble’s case, the highest Texas court, the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), took an important first step by ruling that the admission of Dr. Coons’ testimony violated rules that require that expert testimony be reliable. The CCA inexplicably, however, concluded that the admission of unreliable expert testimony in a capital case does not raise any constitutional issues. Each of the friend-of-the-court briefs filed yesterday — like the petition we filed to have his case heard by the Supreme Court — asks the Supreme Court to step in to restore constitutional protection in Coble’s case, and in the future cases that will inevitably come if the CCA’s mistake is not corrected.
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Race Contributes to Wrongful Convictions
01 year ago
An unusual collection of advocates, exonerated men and a crime victim gathered this week in Raleigh, North Carolina, to highlight the role that race plays in wrongful convictions. The group filed an amicus brief in the case of Melvin White, an African-American death row inmate in North Carolina who maintains his innocence and has filed a claim under North Carolina’s historic Racial Justice Act.
As the brief recounts, African-American defendants are more likely to be wrongfully convicted of crimes punishable by death. In North Carolina, six of the seven exonerated death row inmates were people of color. The last three men exonerated from death row in North Carolina were all African-American, including ACLU client Bo Jones. The majority of nationwide death row exonerations are all also disproportionately people of color.
The explanations for these racial disparities range from deliberate racial stereotyping — such as the perception of jurors and law enforcement that African-Americans are more "prone to violence" — to unconscious racism. For example, witnesses are far more likely to misidentify perpetrators of different races from their own, even if they hold no conscious racial prejudices.
The risk that an innocent person may be executed, intolerable under any circumstance, is a heightened one for African-American defendants. The Racial Justice Act gives courts the tools to eliminate this risk by imposing life sentences in those cases where race played a role in the process.
Can the Racial Justice Act Change the Practice of Picking All-White Juries in North Carolina?
01 year ago
Last week, five North Carolina death row inmates filed motions seeking to have their death sentences vacated under North Carolina’s new Racial Justice Act (RJA), a law that allows death row inmates to use statistics to show that race played a role in their cases. Buried in the fine print of the inmates’ motions is a story worthy of its own headline: a new study by researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) found that prosecutors in North Carolina removed qualified African-American jurors at more than twice the rate that they removed all other jurors.
Last week, The MSU study looked the use of "peremptory strikes," the practice by which attorneys for both sides remove jurors whom they don’t want on the jury. The MSU study found that prosecutors in North Carolina, by overwhelming numbers, don’t want African-Americans on their juries, even if they are not opposed to the death penalty and are fully qualified to serve. Even more revealing, the MSU study found that prosecutors statewide removed African-American jurors at even higher rates in cases where the defendant was African-American: proof that prosecutors are even more intent on reducing the number of African-American jurors if the person to be tried is African-American.
The disturbing results of the MSU study are unfortunately not limited to North Carolina. A report issued by the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama just last month documented racial discrimination in jury selection in death penalty cases across the South.
What is unique about North Carolina is that it is the only state in the country that has a law in place to address the problem of discrimination in the exercise of peremptory strikes. Although the Constitution prohibits racial discrimination in jury selection, the courts have not developed an effective way to stop the problem. In North Carolina, for example, the appellate courts have never reversed a capital case because of discrimination in jury selection.
The country will be watching closely to see if North Carolina’s law can remove the historically fused link between race and jury selection in capital cases. African-Americans were excluded historically from jury service first by laws directly prohibiting their participation, and later by poll taxes, property and literacy requirements. The racially based use of peremptory strikes is the on-going legacy of this history.
Kenneth Rouse’s case will be one of the key tests of the new law’s force. Rouse, one of the first five to file his motion, is one of 33 North Carolina death row inmates sentenced to death by all-white jury. One of the white jurors chosen by the prosecutor to serve on Rouse’s jury routinely referred to African-Americans as "n—–s" and later stated that "bigotry" was influential in his decision to vote for death. In Rouse’s county, the prosecution struck African-American jurors at almost three times the rate it struck all other jurors.
The RJA gives the North Carolina court the power to commute Rouse’s death sentence to life based on the evidence of bias in jury selection in his case. The court’s ruling could be the leap forwarded needed to finally prevent prosecutors from sending home African-American jurors.
(Originally posted to The Seminal.)