Gentle Reader,
We are just back from lots of travel, during which time our home state of North Carolina passed the “North Carolina Racial Justice Act.” The act allows prisoners facing a death penalty or those on death row to request a hearing before a judge, where they and others may produce evidence and sworn testimony that “race was a significant factor” in the decision to seek or impose a death sentence in their case. Here’s the bill. And Politics Daily has some nice coverage which gives a bit of context and links to this study by UNC-CH’s Isaac Unah and Jack Boger which makes a more than persuasive case that race is the single most important factor in the death penalty process in North Carolina.
It’s an interesting development (Kentucky is the only other state with such a provision), and one which could add another handicap to a death penalty system already weighed down by legal provisions and squabbles. North Carolina is already in a de facto death penalty moratorium, and this law adds another obstacle toward carrying out a sentence of death.
This kind of law, which backs away from the death penalty, tinkering with it in an effort to improve it, rather than addressing the fundamental questions behind it, though, is also the kind of law that allows the death penalty to persist. Will the Racial Justice Act dramatize the death penalty’s essential racist core? Or will it, if death sentences are upheld in these hearings, justify a deeply flawed system of lethal punishment?
And it is impossible not to offer a glimpse of some of the comments on the Politics Daily article, comments which well illustrate the nagging problem of race, and the way in which, as we’ve seen at these hijacked town hall meetings on health care, race bleeds into other political concerns in unpleasant ways:
- “Black Racism at it’s finest. Allowing criminals to get lenient treatment because they black is just a continuation of the Obama racist agenda.”
- “Its now time to step back and see who the real racist are. Its not the whites, Its the Blacks and the Mexcans. I have a booth at a flea market with the American flag in lights over it and I have seen that the mexicans won’t even come near it which is ok with me if thats the way they want to be.
All I have seen and heard in my many years here on this earth has shown me and many others that most white people don’t want to be racist but are really not the given the chance by the Blacks and the mexicans, esp the illegal ALIENS.”