Lawmakers moving too fast to increase executions

Editorial by Wilmington Star-News, January 5, 2014.

More and faster executions should not be a proud goal of the N.C. General Assembly, but state Sen. Thom Goolsby and other leaders want to take the state in that direction by pushing hard to resume the death penalty in earnest.

Although still legal in North Carolina, the death penalty has been on a downward path. The last execution in the state was in 2006, in large part because lawsuits challenging how lethal injections were administered led to a de facto moratorium; this year the Honorables approved a new method considered more humane, comparatively speaking.

Nationally, death sentences have declined in recent years in part because of a number of high-profile cases in which a death row inmate has been cleared by DNA or other evidence. Illinois, where series of such cases led to a 10-year moratorium on executions, abolished the death penalty in 2011. North Carolina's most compelling case involved the exoneration of death row inmate Alan Gell, who was in jail on a car theft charge when the murder he was sentenced to die for took place.

Paralleling the national pattern, over the past two years only one trial in North Carolina has resulted in a death sentence. North Carolina should not be so eager to reverse that trend, especially since there is a solid alternative – life in prison without parole, a death sentence carried out over many years.

Polls show that most Americans still support selective use of the death penalty. To many, the "eye for an eye" approach is just punishment for those who commit murder and leave victims' families to forever grieve. About 60 percent of respondents in an October Gallup poll said they support capital punishment, compared with 35 percent opposed. But that support was the lowest in 40 years. A poll of North Carolinians by the liberal, Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling found that 70 percent of residents oppose the death penalty if life without parole is an option.

Regardless of whether they support capital punishment in principle, many Americans have trouble accepting that the possible execution of an innocent person is a necessary by-product of the justice system.

Most people on death row are guilty. But even then, the death penalty is not applied fairly, as a number of respected studies have confirmed. And last year Gov. Pat McCrory signed legislation abolishing the Racial Justice Act of 2009, which provided a legal avenue for death-row inmates to prove – prove – that race played a role in their sentencing. In the only four cases heard before the repeal, a Fayetteville judge found "powerful and unmistakable" evidence of bias, including prosecutors' deliberate dismissal of qualified black jurors at a far higher rate than white jurors.

The sentences of the inmates in those cases were commuted to life without parole; dozens of others who appealed their death sentences before the repeal are awaiting hearings that may or may not happen.

Ben David, the district attorney for New Hanover and Pender counties, supports the death penalty for "an elite class of first-degree murderers where aggravating factors overwhelmingly support the imposition of the maximum punishment." It is sad but true: In society's eyes, some murders are considered worse than others, although all take a human life.

For now, the death penalty is North Carolina's means of avenging particularly heinous murders, but that doesn't mean we should be eager to employ it.