12 Apr 2019

After hate-filled murders in N.C., choosing a legacy of love and light over the darkness of the death penalty

by | posted in: Criminal Justice Reform, Declining Support, Declining Use, Failure to Serve Victims, Latest News, National News | 0

April 12, 2019

Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha
Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Those words were first spoken by Martin Luther King Jr., and many have repeated them. But it takes integrity to live by them, especially when hate has touched you in the most profound way.

Yet, that’s exactly what the families of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha have done again and again since February 2015, when these three promising Muslim students were senselessly murdered by an angry white neighbor. The crime not only ripped a hole in their families and deprived the world of three wonderful people, it terrorized the entire Muslim community. To make it worse, since the murders, their loved ones have been targeted with hateful slurs.

Their response has been to ensure that the legacy of their beautiful children will be one of love, not hate. They opened a community center for young Muslim people in a house that Barakat once owned. They started an annual interfaith food drive in the victims’ honor. Just this week, they traveled to Washington D.C. to share their story at a Congressional hearing on hate crimes.

And then Thursday, when the Durham district attorney announced that she would not seek the death penalty against their killer, the victims’ brother, Farris Barakat, stood before a crowd of reporters and expressed the family’s support for the decision. He cited those words from Dr. King and acknowledged that nothing that happens in a courtroom can ever bring true “closure” for their loss.

The myth of the death penalty is that it has a magical power to bring closure to grieving families. But the truth is that it only stokes more hate and anger. It only creates more grieving families. It only brings more darkness into our world.

D.A. Satana Deberry explained that removing the death penalty from the picture would allow the trial – already overdue – to proceed without delay. Deberry made the right decision in this difficult case, one that should be an example for other prosecutors dealing with painful crimes. The death penalty delays and extends trials and appeals, making them more painful for all involved. And, for all that, only a tiny fraction of cases ever result in execution.

Deberry also said that bringing the case to trial quickly will allow the family to begin to heal. It’s clear they’ve already begun that difficult work. Their actions this week were yet another step toward ensuring that the memories of their loved ones will be beacons of love and hope, rather than catalysts for hatred and death.

14 Mar 2019

In California, the moral case for ending the death penalty

by | posted in: Abolition, Declining Support, Declining Use, Latest News, National News | 0

In today’s world, it’s easy to think politicians on both sides of the aisle care only about their own power and reelection chances. But every once in a while, we see an act of moral leadership that renews our faith in government. This week, it happened in California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he would dismantle the death chamber and grant the state’s nearly 750 death row inmates a reprieve. They will remain incarcerated but will no longer live under the threat of execution. It was a stunning move in a state with the nation’s largest death row.

Newsom ends California death penalty

What’s more, Newsom didn’t just couch his decision in the safe terms of how much money it would save the state —billions — or how hopelessly backlogged the state’s death penalty machine was. Since 1976, California has sentenced hundreds of people to death yet carried out 13 executions. He also made a strong moral argument against the death penalty.

Newsom noted proven racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the way the death penalty preys on poor people, and the national epidemic of wrongful convictions. And then he described a conversation with Bryan Stevenson. “He said it’s not a question, the death penalty, of whether people deserve to die for their heinous acts. The question really is, do we have the right to kill? That’s a deep and existential question. I know people think it’s an eye for an eye, but if you rape, we don’t rape. And I think, if someone kills, we don’t kill. We’re better than that.”

Newsom also laid out the unthinkable scenario that might have ensued without his action. “What we’re being asked to do in California is to consider executing more people than any state in modern American history,” he said. “To line people up to be executed — premeditated, state sponsored executions — one a week for over 14 years. That’s a choice we can make, or we can make, I think, a more enlightened choice, to advance justice in a different way.”

Watch Newsom’s full speech here.

North Carolina faces a very similar situation. Like California, we have not executed anyone since 2006. We have one of the country’s largest death rows, made up mostly of people tried decades ago. Nine innocent people have been exonerated after being sentenced to die, and more claims of innocence are under investigation.

Our state has spent millions on the death penalty and executed just a few dozen people, offering the ultimate punishment to only a tiny handful of victims’ families. And if North Carolina were to resume executions, at the rate of one a week, it would take us nearly three years to kill all the people on death row — a macabre spectacle.

North Carolina, too, should make the enlightened choice to put an official end to the death penalty. There are better ways to do justice and bring comfort to the families of victims. And there are better ways to show that killing is wrong.

17 Dec 2018

Why we’re winning the fight against the death penalty in North Carolina

by | posted in: Declining Support, Declining Use, Latest News, Statistics | 0
NC Supreme Court Building with American and State Flag, seen through the trees
North Carolina Supreme Court

 

December 17, 2018 

Sometimes, the fight to end the death penalty can feel like a long, slow slog. But we’ve got good news. We are winning!

In 2018, for the second year in a row, juries didn’t hand down any new death sentences. Two years in a row of no new death sentences? That’s never happened before. We shouldn’t underestimate how significant that is in a state that, in the 1990s, sent dozens of people to death row every year.

For the twelfth year in a row, no executions were carried out in 2018.

Even our state’s district attorneys have begun to flag in their enthusiasm for death sentences. Only three counties (out of 100!) held death penalty trials this year. In Buncombe County, District Attorney Todd Williams is going a step further. He has begun reevaluating decades-old death sentences — and when he finds that the defendant got an unfair trial, he agrees to stop seeking execution and allow the person to serve life without parole instead.

In 2019, we have more reform-minded DAs who will take office in Durham and Charlotte. We’re hoping they will be part of a national trend away from the death penalty, mass incarceration, and racially-disparate punishments. [America’s Leading Reform-Minded District Attorney Has Taken His Most Radical Step Yet]

As this year comes to a close, 140 people remain on death row in North Carolina. Their lives depend on us continuing to fight — and continuing to win.

16 Oct 2018

NC, let’s take a hint from Washington: It’s time to end the racist death penalty

by | posted in: Abolition, Arbitrary Use, Declining Support, Declining Use, Latest News, Laws have Changed, but Sentences Remain Unexamined, National News, Racial Bias | 0

October 16, 2018

Last week, Washington became the 20th state to end the death penalty after its Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment is arbitrary and racially biased. If those are reasons to outlaw the death penalty, then it is surely time for the North Carolina death penalty to go.

How much more proof can you ask for that the death penalty is racist and arbitrary in our state?

More than 63 percent of North Carolina’s death 141 row prisoners are people of color, even though they make up less than 30 percent of the state population. More than two dozen of the people on death row were sentenced to die by all-white juries.

A comprehensive statistical study found that defendants who kill white victims are more likely to get the death penalty, and that across the state, African American citizens are systematically, and illegally, excluded from capital juries.

If that’s not enough, let’s talk about arbitrariness.

A new report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation shows that most of the people on N.C. death row are only there because they had the bad luck to be tried under outdated laws, before there were basic legal protections to ensure fairness at their trials. Had they been tried under modern laws, most wouldn’t be on death row today.

Watch the story of Nathan Bowie, who because there was no indigent defense agency at the time of his trial, ended up with an alcoholic lawyer who came to court drunk.

Today, after the enactment of many reforms, only a handful of people each year face capital trials. Yet, the selection of that handful remains arbitrary. It has more to do with the practices of the local DA, the county where the crime occurred, and the defendant’s willingness to accept a plea bargain than it does with the severity of the crime.

Across the country, people have become unwilling to ignore the obviousness unfairness that infects the death penalty. Last week, Washington admitted the truth about its death penalty. It’s time for North Carolina to do the same.

24 Jan 2018

This keeps happening: Wake jury rejects death penalty for 9th time in a row

by | posted in: Declining Support, Declining Use, Latest News, Wake County | 1
Donovan Richardson

January 24, 2018

It’s starting to feel like Groundhog Day in Wake County. Every year begins with a capital trial, and every year, the jury chooses life. This week was the ninth time since 2008 that a Wake jury said no to the death penalty. [Donovan Richardson sentenced to life in prison for 2014 double murder]

We’re hoping that, from now on, we can skip this annual ritual.

Wake is the only county in the state where a defendant has been tried capitally every year for the past three years. Since the beginning of 2016, three of North Carolina’s 10 capital trials have been in Wake County. By contrast, Mecklenburg County — home to Charlotte — hasn’t had a capital trial since 2014.

Why has a county where a jury hasn’t agreed to death sentence in a decade become North Carolina’s leader in death penalty trials? It makes no sense.

It’s not as if a capital trial is the same as a non-capital one with another sentence option thrown in. Adding the death penalty to the mix transforms the entire process. The defendant has a right to two attorneys, the jury members must be chosen based on their willingness to impose a death sentence, the trial lasts weeks longer, and the process costs more than four times as much as a non-capital prosecution.

There’s something else, too, that’s starting to get repetitive in Wake County. At every capital trial, it’s a black defendant having his fate decided by an almost entirely white jury. At the last three capital trials combined, there were only two black jurors.

In fact, we got curious and looked back. Of Wake’s nine failed capital trials since 2009, seven of the defendants were black. And during those years, several white defendants were tried non-capitally for high-profile crimes. Remember Jonathan Broyhill, Joanna Madonna, Jason Young, or Bradley Cooper?

There are just so many reasons for North Carolina’s capital county to leave the shadow of the death penalty behind.