Will North Carolina’s death penalty get killed by its Racial Justice Act?

The question in the title of this post is inspired by this effective new piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Death Penalty Goes on Trial in North Carolina.” Here are excerpts:

Last year, North Carolina enacted what’s known as the Racial Justice Act, requiring judges to let any inmate off death row if the judge finds that race was a “significant factor” in the death sentence.

About 95% of the state’s death-row population, or 152 inmates …, filed bias claims by the August deadline, according to the North Carolina attorney general’s office. The law also allows future capital-murder defendants to claim racial bias. Convicts whose petitions were successful would instead face life sentences, with no chance of parole.

North Carolina’s new law is among the most hotly debated responses to recent criticism of the death penalty. Many states have rethought the sentence amid new genetic evidence that has freed some inmates….

North Carolina has undertaken the most far-reaching effort to date to examine the amorphous question of whether race played an improper role in decisions to seek or impose death sentences. It likely will be several months before any of the claims are considered by the courts, attorneys said.

“There are so many variables that can legitimately affect a prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty, including the seriousness of an offense,” said Christopher Slobogin, a death-penalty expert at Vanderbilt University Law School. “This will be a messy enterprise.”

Other states could follow North Carolina’s lead. Legislation is pending in Pennsylvania to allow death sentences to be challenged on the grounds of racial bias. A similar bill was introduced this year in California, though it was defeated because of concerns it would cost too much to administer, said a spokeswoman for Democratic California state senator Gilbert Cedillo, who introduced it.

Death-penalty critics and civil-rights advocates in North Carolina had pushed for several years to pass legislation aimed at examining the role of race in death-penalty cases. The Rouse case involves unusually specific evidence of alleged bias, and it was cited by advocates of the Racial Justice Act as an example of how discrimination can affect jurors’ decision making, according to lawyers involved in the debate over the law….

No particular case served as catalyst for the final legislation, according to people involved in the process. “We had quite a few people in the state who were concerned about the large number of people on death row who are African-American,” said state Democratic senator Floyd McKissick Jr., who sponsored the legislation.

The legislation drew heated debate, narrowly passing the Democratic-controlled legislature. No Republican voted for it. “We are just giving murderers an additional tool to delay justice,” Justin Burr, a Republican state legislator said….

Some Republicans in the fall election season have continued to criticize their Democratic opponents for voting in favor of the legislation, although now the debate over bias legislation has been subsumed by a bigger controversy, attorneys said. The North Carolina attorney general’s office last month released a report that the state’s crime lab had routinely failed to disclose evidence possibly favorable to defendants, including in death-penalty cases.

Prosecutors also resisted the law, saying that it calls for a costly and unnecessary wholesale review of cases. “I feel very confident that race has not played a role in imposing the death penalty,” said Peg Dorer, director of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys.

Of particular concern to prosecutors and other opponents is that the new law allows murder defendants to try to prove bias through broad statistical evidence, such as data showing that North Carolina prosecutors, on a county-wide or state-wide basis, have sought the death penalty more frequently against black defendants or in cases involving a white victim. “You shouldn’t try a case on statistics,” said Sarah Stevens, a North Carolina Republican legislator. “Statistics can be manipulated.”