Time to rev up N.C.'s executions? No

It's time to juice up the needle. No more slacking off on sending the N.C. death-row inmates to the death chamber for their lethal injection.

That's the thinking behind a new bill introduced Wednesday by New Hanover Republican senator Thom Goolsby. Goolsby's Senate Bill 306 would repeal the 2009 N.C. Racial Justice Act, a law state Republicans already gutted last year. The changes drastically reduced the ability of judges to use general statistics and data to decide whether a death row inmate was given the death penalty because of his or her race. Goolsby gave his support for that revamped bill lawmakers approved, saying then that he didn't "trust statisticians or people who come in after the fact to find some way to get coldblooded killers off of death row."

But that wasn't good enough and now he's calling for the law's total revocation. His bill also calls for doctors, nurses and pharmacists to participate in executions without fear of punishment from state licensing boards, something the courts have already declared permissible. And it also requires a somewhat ghoulish death watch by lawmakers with mandated updates to the General Assembly on the status of post-conviction death penalty cases, and on the training of executioners.

This editorial board supported toughening the RJA. The amended law narrowed which statistics could be considered valid and it put a higher burden on inmates to show discrimination in their individual cases. But this board has also noted that the law has a simple and justifiable premise. Statistics show decades of racial bias in death penalty cases and judges should be able to consider that history in some fashion when reviewing a sentence. The revamped law allows that within narrower limits. Defendants can use statistics they they think prove racial bias from a time span 10 years before a slaying and two years after a sentence. Before there had been no time limit. The revamped law also says statistics alone cannot prove race was a significant factor in a death row inmate's conviction or sentence. Statistics also are now limited to conduct of prosecutors near where the murder occurred, rather than anywhere in the entire state as the previous law allowed.

The impetus for Goolsby's bill though is less about the particulars of the Racial Justice Act than about an ideological stand on the death penalty. He forthrightly says he just wants to get these state killings back in action. “We have a moral obligation to ensure death-row criminals convicted of the most heinous crimes imaginable finally face justice,” he said Wednesday. “Victims’ families have suffered for far too long. It’s time to stop the legal wrangling and bring them the peace and closure they deserve.”

This board agrees that those convicted of the most heinous crimes must be punished appropriately. But in this state some convicted of the most heinous murders do not end up on death row, and others whose crimes are arguably less heinous do. 

In 2006, for instance, when Samuel Flippen was executed for killing his 2-year-old stepdaughter, David Crespi of Charlotte was sentenced to life for murdering his 5-year-old twin daughters. Flippen was the last person executed in North Carolina, by the way. In 2010 in two highly publicized heinous crimes, Demario Atwater was sentenced to life for the murder of UNC student Eve Carson and former Marine Cesar Laurean was sentenced to life for the murder of pregnant Marine Maria Lauterbach.

Prosecutors decide to seek the death penalty in some cases and not in others for any number of reasons. Juries decide to give the death penalty in similar fashion. The heinous nature of the crime is not always the deciding factor.

Additionally, North Carolina has a troubling track record of wrongful murder convictions, convictions that have only been overturned in recent years as inmates have gained access to DNA that can prove their innocence.

This board has said before and repeats that a better way to deal with the problematic application of the death penalty is to stop using it and go to a system of life without the possibility of parole. That is the mandated sentence even if an inmate can prove discrimination under the Racial Justice Act. This is no get-of- jail-free card as opponents of RJA had once claimed. 

North Carolina then would be in line with the changing national attitude. Thirty-three states have the death penalty and 17 have abolished it. But more and more are moving toward abolition, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. So far this year legislators in several states have introduced legislation to either abolish or reform the death penalty. Among them are lawmakers in Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, Maryland, New Hampshire and Oregon. Texas, which has recorded the largest number of executions annually, is also considering reforms and an Innocence Commission to deal with wrongful convictions. 

Even with the death penalty in place, only nine states carried out death sentences last year, equaling the fewest number of states to do so in 20 years. More than half the nation's states, 29, have not carried out an execution in five years. The 43 executions in 2012 was 56 percent less than the number of executions in the peak year of 1999. Five states in five years have abandoned the death penalty.

Instead of trying to restart the state killing industry, North Carolina should join those states abandoning it. It's too often unfairly administered even when race is not a factor.