The North Carolina Supreme Court has sent back to the trial court the cases on that state's ill-conceived, misnamed, and since repealed "Racial Justice Act." The purpose of that act is to defeat rather than promote justice, and it allows murderers to overturn their sentences based on the kind of statistics-based arguments rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in McCleskey v. Kemp. (See my law review article for background on the racial statistics controversy.)
Jacob Gershman has this article in the WSJ.
The state supreme court vacated the decisions in favor of the murderers, but it did so on the narrow ground that the trial judge did not allow the prosecution sufficient time to gather evidence to rebut a large study submitted to support the claim. That means the case goes on.
Jacob Gershman has this article in the WSJ.
The state supreme court vacated the decisions in favor of the murderers, but it did so on the narrow ground that the trial judge did not allow the prosecution sufficient time to gather evidence to rebut a large study submitted to support the claim. That means the case goes on.
The breadth of respondent's study placed petitioner in the position of defending the peremptory challenges that the State of North Carolina had exercised in capital prosecutions over a twenty-year period. Petitioner had very limited time, however, between the delivery of respondent's study and the hearing date. Continuing this matter to give petitioner more time would have done no harm to respondent, whose remedy under the Act was a life sentence without the possibility of parole. See N.C.G.S. ยง 15A-2012(a)(3). Under these exceptional circumstances, fundamental fairness required that petitioner have an adequate opportunity to prepare for this unusual and complex proceeding. Therefore, the trial court abused its discretion by denying petitioner's third motion for a continuance.In the procedural posture of this case, "respondent" is the murderer and "petitioner" is the state.
A simple, obvious, and final way to dispose of the cases is to dismiss them on the ground that the legislature has repealed the law on which they are based.
The supreme court did not rule on that basis, but the issue remains open on remand. "On remand, the trial court should address petitioner's constitutional and statutory challenges pertaining to the Act."
When a question of pure law, requiring no fact-finding, can end the case, it is far more efficient for an appellate court to address that issue before sending the case back. After all, if the state wins that point, there is no need for a long, expensive fact-finding process. Why didn't the supreme court do that? Maybe they just don't want to take the heat, at least not yet.
They just don't want to take the heat---so they'll sentence victims' families to years of more torture.
This RJA was extremely pernicious (surprise that Dems would support that)--a finding of racial bias would have opened the conviction to attack.