Notable new study on 56 failed capital cases in North Carolina over past 25 years
Fending off a capital murder charge can cost falsely accused defendants money, jobs, homes and their health, according to a report released by the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation.
The center studied 56 cases from 1989 to 2015 in which the death penalty was threatened as a potential punishment, but the charges were either dropped or the person charged was acquitted at trial. The results suggest that prosecutors sometimes use the threat of the state’s most severe penalty when their evidence is the weakest, said Gerda Stein, a spokeswoman for the center. “They believe they have the right person,” Stein said. “The problem is, they don’t have enough evidence.”
The center’s report suggests the death penalty is used to bully defendants into accepting plea deals or to extract confessions from witnesses.
North Carolina has not executed a criminal defendant since 2006 as lawsuits over the method of execution and the now-repealed Racial Justice Act have kept the state from moving forward. During that time, there have been high-profile exonerations of death row inmates, including the recently pardoned Leon Brown and his half-brother, Henry McCollum.
Less well known are cases like that of Leslie Lincoln, who was accused of her mother’s 2002 murder. She was implicated in part by faulty DNA evidence. Ultimately, she was found not guilty at trial, but she struggled with the aftermath of spending three years in jail and another two years on house arrest. She lost her job, savings and home and suffered from anxiety and depression after the acquittal, according to the report….
The center distributed embargoed copies of its report last week. One of those who reviewed a copy was former Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, who says he does not oppose the death penalty but is troubled by its uneven application. “I think one of the points the report stresses is the leverage that comes with trying somebody and potentially pursuing the death penalty,” Orr said. “It is sometimes the weakest cases, the ones where you don’t have the strong evidence, that there seems to be an inclination to try to move forward with the death penalty.”
The report doesn’t suggest specific fixes to the issue. The center is one of a number of groups that has argued for the elimination of the death penalty altogether.
Orr said that, if the state is going to continue having capital punishment, it needs to do more to ensure a fair system. Both prosecutors and the defense attorneys for indigent defendants need better funding, he said, and he suggested the state ought to somehow centralize the decision on whether the death penalty is pursued, taking it out of the hands of prosecutors who might use the threat of capital punishment as tactical leverage. “That would make for a fairer, more even-handed, dispassionate decision-making process,” he said.
The title of this new report is “On Trial for their Lives: The Hidden Costs of Wrongful Capital Prosecutions in North Carolina,” and it can be accessed via this link. That link also provides this summary of report’s main findings about the 56 North Carolina cases it studied:
• The state spent nearly $2.4 million in defense costs alone to pursue these failed cases capitally. Had the defendants been charged non-capitally, all that money could have been saved. (This conservative figure does not take into account the additional prosecution and incarceration costs in capital cases.)
• Defendants who were wrongfully prosecuted spent an average of two years in jail before they were acquitted by juries or had their charges dismissed by prosecutors.
• The 56 defendants in the study spent a total of 112 years in jail, despite never being convicted of a crime.
• By the time they were cleared of wrongdoing, many defendants lost their homes, jobs, businesses, and savings accounts, and saw personal relationships destroyed. They received no compensation after they were cleared of charges.
• Serious errors or misconduct played a role in many cases. The 56 cases involved instances of witness coercion, hidden evidence, bungled investigations, the use of improper forensic evidence, and highly unreliable witnesses.