FAYETTEVILLE, n.c. — In a landmark ruling, a North Carolina judge Friday vacated the death penalty of a convicted black murderer, saying prosecutors across the state had engaged for years in a deliberate and systematic pattern of racial discrimination while striking black potential jurors in death-penalty cases.
The decision by Superior Court Judge Gregory Weeks could help set a precedent nationwide in death-penalty cases, which for years have included arguments by black defendants and civil rights lawyers that prosecutors keep blacks off juries for overtly racial reasons.
In a 167-page order harshly critical of prosecutors, Weeks said they “intentionally used the race of (jury pool) members as a significant factor in decisions to exercise peremptory strikes in capital cases.”
He ruled that discrimination was a factor not only in the case Weeks heard involving convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson, but also in capital cases involving black defendants across North Carolina.
The ruling was the first under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, passed in 2009, which allows judges to reduce death sentences to life in prison without parole in cases where defendants prove racial bias in jury selection. Prosecutors fought the law, calling it a back-door attempt to overturn the death penalty.
Weeks, who is black, said, “Race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by prosecutors” statewide during the time Robinson was on trial. That was enough, he said, “to support an inference of intentional discrimination.”
Robinson, sentenced to death for killing a white teenager in 1991, was resentenced by Weeks to life in prison without parole. Robinson, 38, is among 150 death-row inmates, both white and black, who have filed appeals in North Carolina under the act. Defense attorneys said three of those cases are in the courts and may be heard soon.
The decision was greeted by Robinson’s lawyers and civil rights advocates as a groundbreaking affirmation of ingrained racial discrimination by prosecutors in a Southern state.
