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The verdict is in: Race still decides juries in N.C.
The Racial Justice Act went to the Supreme Court this week. Now, the state’s highest court must decide how North Carolina should deal with troubling revelations of racial bias in capital trials. The...
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Innocents get 4 percent of U.S. death sentences
We know that more than 140 innocent people have been released from death rows across the United States in the past three and a half decades. But a big question has always remained: How many more...
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N.C. could be the next Oklahoma
Maybe you have heard by now about the horribly botched execution in Oklahoma this week? That inmate’s protracted, painful death, and the national firestorm that has erupted in its wake, provide a...
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Perfect death penalty still out of reach
North Carolina is still miles away from creating a fair and just capital punishment system, a new report shows. Today, The Constitution Project’s Death Penalty Committee — a bi-partisan group that...
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8 Reasons Why Executing People is More Trouble Than It’s Worth
Some of N.C.’s legislators say it’s time to restart executions here, after a nearly eight-year hiatus. Do they know what they’re suggesting? North Carolina has one of the largest death rows in the...
View ArticleWake’s verdict is in: Life, not death
When a Wake County jury chose life instead of death last week for Armond Devega, they delivered another verdict as well: Wake County doesn’t need the death penalty anymore. The last time a jury chose...
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New poll: Majority in U.S. choose life over death
A majority of Americans say they favor replacing the death penalty with a maximum sentence of life without parole. If you still have doubts that the death penalty is losing popularity in the United...
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Will Johnny Burr be executed for a crime that never occurred?
We like to think that a capital appeals process that lasts years weeds out all the innocent and wrongly-convicted death row inmates. Sadly, that’s just not the case. Johnny Burr has been on North...
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Owning up to mistakes in death penalty cases
Eric Call Hats off to prosecutors and law enforcement officers in Ashe County! In a courtroom in Jefferson, NC, last week, Eric Call, a man who spent nearly two decades on death row, was resentenced to...
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In CA and NC, death penalty is “empty promise”
Yesterday, a California court confirmed what we have known in North Carolina for years: The death penalty is so dysfunctional as to be not just unconstitutional, but futile. The ruling said of a system...
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N.C.’s longest serving death row inmate innocent after 30 years
Henry McCollum, moments after a judge declared him innocent.Photo by Jenny Warburg 30 years, 11 months, 5 days. That’s how long it took for Henry McCollum and Leon Brown to finally prove their...
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“I couldn’t help Henry in a system where the deck was stacked against him”
Ken Rose, a senior attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, writes about his experience representing an innocent death row inmate, Henry McCollum, for 20 years. This essay was originally...
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For victims, 30 years of grief and dead ends
The family of Sabrina Buie cries outside the courtroom. Photo by Jenny Warburg I saw a lot of sad things in the Lumberton, N.C., courtroom where I watched the exoneration last week of Henry McCollum...
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Finally, a D.A. speaks death penalty truth
Johnson Britt Surely, many N.C. prosecutors have their doubts about the death penalty. How can they not? They see up close how arbitrarily it is used, how many resources it wastes, how many mistakes...
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With executions stalled, N.C. murder rate falls
The newest N.C. crime statistics are out, and the murder rate has gone down once again — without any executions. Nationally, many studies have shown that the death penalty does nothing to deter crime....
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Another innocent released from N.C. prison
Willie Womble On Friday, a North Carolina man was released from prison more than three decades after being convicted of a murder he had nothing to do with. He is intellectually disabled and, as a young...
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Americans say it’s wrong to execute mentally ill. States do it anyway.
Scott Panetti A national poll released this week showed that Americans of both political parties overwhelmingly oppose the death penalty for people with mental illness. Overall, 58 percent said they...
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Exonerations at record pace in 2014, as death penalty threatens the innocent
Henry McCollum in September, moments after a judge declared him innocent.Photo by Jenny Warburg New death sentences in the U.S. reached a 40-year low in 2014, and North Carolina passed its eight year...
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How many innocents must be released before we end the death penalty?
Joseph Sledge How on earth did it take 38 years to exonerate Joseph Sledge? On Friday, Sledge was the eighth man freed by the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission. That number doesn’t include the...
View ArticleAsheville residents say ‘Yes!’ to halting executions
Recently, the Asheville Citizen-Times asked its readers a simple question: Do you support a death penalty moratorium? The answer was a landslide. Seventy-two percent of the 302 people who voted said...
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