News and Updates

Convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson has his sentence changed to life without parole in a blistering ruling that accuses state prosecutors of systematic discrimination.

Credit: Shawn Rocco/Raleigh News & Observer

Shirley Burns, center, hugs her friendy after Cumberland County Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks found that racial bias played a role in the trial and death row sentencing of Burns' son inmate Marcus Robinson.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In a landmark ruling, a North Carolina judge on Friday vacated the death penalty of a black man convicted of murder, saying prosecutors across the state had engaged in deliberate and systematic racial discrimination when striking black potential jurors in death penalty cases.

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 when defendants can prove racial bias in jury selection. Prosecutors had fought the act, the nation's only such law, calling it a back-door attempt to overturn the death penalty.

Interviews with Everette Thompson, southeast regional director of Amnesty USA, and Robert King, one of the Angola 3, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Two events -- one in the Connecticut Senate chamber, the other in a Dallas courtroom -- helped once again to focus attention on two of the nation's most glaring flaws: wrongful convictions and capital punishment.

When lawyers for death row inmate Todd Rizzo urged the state Supreme Court to throw out his death sentence in 2010, they pointed to what had happened at the state Capitol a year earlier to make their argument that the punishment should be tossed on constitutional grounds.

In 2009, the General Assembly voted to repeal the death penalty. But then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell vetoed the bill.