Marcus Robinson listens intently to his Racial Justice Act hearing in 2012.The News & Observer, Shawn Rocco/AP Photo
In 1994, Marcus Robinson, who is black, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of Erik Tornblom, a white teenager, in Cumberland County, North Carolina. He spent almost 20 years on death row, but in 2012 his sentence was changed to life without parole. He was one of four death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by a judge who found that racial discrimination had played a role in their trials.
The reason their cases were reviewed at all was because of a 2009 North Carolina law known as the Racial Justice Act, which allowed judges to reduce the death penalty to life in prison without parole when defendants could demonstrate racial bias in their charge, jury selection or sentencing.
“The Racial Justice Act ensures that when North Carolina hands down our state’s harshest punishment to our most heinous criminals,” former Gov. Bev Perdue. he said When he signed the bill into law, “the decision is based on facts and the law, not racial prejudice.”
At 21, Robinson was the youngest person sentenced to death in North Carolina. When he was three years old, he was hospitalized with severe seizures after being physically abused by his father and was diagnosed with permanent brain dysfunction. However, those were not the only troubling aspects of his case.
“We continue to believe that the Racial Justice Act is a poorly designed law that has little to do with race and absolutely nothing to do with justice.”
Racial discrimination in jury selection has been prohibited since it was prohibited by the Supreme Court in its 1986 Supreme Court decision. Batson v. Kentucky, but Robinson’s process was infected. The prosecutor in the case, John Dickson, disproportionately rejected eligible black potential jurors. For example, he struck a black potential juror because the man had once been charged with public drunkenness. However, it did accept two “non-black” people with DWI convictions. Of the pool’s eligible members, it hit half of blacks and only 14 percent of non-black members. In the end, Robinson was tried by a 12-person jury that included only three people of color—one Native American and two blacks.
Racial discrimination in jury selection was not uncommon in North Carolina’s criminal justice system. A comprehensive Michigan State University study looked at more than 7,400 potential jurors in 173 cases from 1990 to 2010. Researchers found that state prosecutors struck 52.6 percent of eligible potential jurors and only 25.7 percent of all other potential jurors. This prejudice was reflected on death. Of the 147 people on North Carolina’s death row, 35 inmates were convicted by all-white juries; 38 from juries with only one black member.
Under the racial justice act, the death row prisoners had a year from when the bill becomes law to present a motion. Nearly all of the state’s 145 death row inmates have filed claims, but only Robison and three others — Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters — have gotten hearings. In 2012, Robinson was the first. In Cumberland County Superior Court, Judge Gregory Weeks ruled that race had played a significant role in the trial and Robinson was resentenced to life without words. North Carolina appealed the decision to the State Supreme Court.
The decision was immediately followed by an apology. The North Carolina District Attorneys Conference has published a declaration saying: “Capital cases reflect the most brutal and heinous criminals in our society. Whether the death penalty is an appropriate sentence for murderers should be addressed by our lawmakers in the General Assembly, not disguised as claims (of) racism in our courts.”
The ruling drew a lot of publicity from across the country and North Carolina lawmakers were outraged. “There are definitely signs in the legislative record that there were some (lawmakers) who really wanted to see the executions move forward,” says Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project who also represents Robinson. Legislative staff circulated talking points for lawmakers with arguments that the RJA turns “district attorneys into racists and convicted murderers into victims,” describing the law as “an end run around the penalty of death and an indefinite moratorium on capital punishment”.
On the day Judge Weeks resentenced Robinson, Senate President Pro Tempore for the State Legislature, Phillip Berger, expressed concern that Robinson might be eligible for parole. He suggested that Robinson – who had just turned 18 when he committed the crime and would not have been considered a juvenile – would not be eligible for life in prison without the possibility of parole, citing a United States Supreme Court decision that prohibited juveniles from being sentenced to life without parole. “We cannot allow cold-blooded killers to be let loose in our community, and I hope the state appeals this decision,” he said. “Regardless of the outcome, we continue to believe that the Racial Justice Act is a poorly designed law that has little to do with race and absolutely nothing to do with justice.”
The state Legislature took up the challenge and voted to cancel the Racial Justice Act in 2013. This made it impossible for those on death row to even try to have their sentence reviewed for racial prejudice, but left the fate of the four who had been transferred to prison a unclear life. “The state’s district attorneys are nearly unanimous in their bipartisan conclusion that the Racial Justice Act has created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice,” Governor Pat McCrory said in a statement at the time.
Although the law was still in effect when the four prisoners’ sentences were commuted, they were not safe from the death penalty. Robinson’s sentence had been legally reduced, but the legal battle had just begun.
In 2015, after almost two years since the initial hearing, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ordered the Superior Court to reconsider reduced sentences for Robinson, Augustine, Golphin and Walters, saying the judge did not give the state enough time to prepare for the “complex” trial.
Last January, Superior Court Judge Erwin Spainhour ruled that because the RJA had been repealed, the four defendants he could no longer use the law to reduce their sentences. “North Carolina has pledged to take an unprecedented look at the role of racial bias in capital punishment,” says Stubbs. But now, “the state Legislature has explicitly reneged on its commitment and repealed the law.”
Robinson returned to death in Central Prison in the state capital of Raleigh. In the petition to the state Supreme Court, Robinson’s attorneys point out that the Double Jeopardy Clause — the law that prevents someone from being tried twice for the same crime — prevents North Carolina from trying to reimpose the death penalty because the 2012 RJA hearing acquitted him. of capital punishment.
“He was never resented to death,” says Stubbs. “They have no basis to keep him in death.”
