Racial Justice Act

Under pressure from a group of 43 district attorneys, who expressed opposition to the act, citing the clog of the court system in the state, the North Carolina Senate passed a bill by a 27-14 vote on November 28, 2011, that would have effectively repealed the Racial Justice Act.^[2] However, on December 14, Governor Bev Perdue, a Democrat, vetoed the bill. She said that while she supports the death penalty, she felt it was "simply unacceptable for racial prejudice to play a role in the imposition of the death penalty in North Carolina."^[3] The state legislature did not have enough votes to override Perdue's veto.

In 2012 the North Carolina General Assembly passed a major revision of the law authored by Rep. Paul Stam (R-Wake). The rewrite "severely restricts the use of statistics to only the county or judicial district where the crime occurred, instead of the entire state or region. It also says statistics alone are insufficient to prove bias and that the race of the victim cannot be taken into account." However, studies have shown that when the victim is white, Black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death if convicted. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Perdue. But this time the legislature overrode the governor's veto.^[4]

The North Carolina General Assembly voted to repeal the entire law in 2013. It included a provision that nullified any existing claims based on the law by making the repeal apply retroactively. Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican elected in 2012, signed the repeal into law.^[5] On June 5, 2020, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled the portion of the repeal that retroactively voided claims based on the law was unconstitutional under the North Carolina state constitution's prohibition on ex post facto laws.^[6]

On April 20, 2012, in the first case appealed under the Racial Justice Act, Judge Greg Weeks, then-Senior Resident Superior Court Judge in Cumberland County (Fayetteville), ruled in favor of the plaintiff Marcus Raymond Robinson that racial bias had influenced his case, automatically commuting his death sentence to life without parole. Robinson contended that when he was sentenced to death in 1994, prosecutors had deliberately kept Blacks off the jury. Robinson's lawyers cited a study from Michigan State University College of Law indicating that prosecutors across North Carolina improperly used their peremptory challenges to systemically exclude qualified Black jurors from jury service.^[7][8][9] By 2014, three more cases, that of Christina Walters, Tilmon Golphin, and Quintel Augustine, had been successfully appealed. However, in 2015, the state's Supreme Court vacated the rulings on procedural grounds.^[10][11] However, in September 2020, it reinstated the sentencing modifications. The Supreme Court has also ruled that the repeal cannot be applied retroactively.^[12]