death penalty news October 8, 2004
NORTH CAROLINA: Debate on death penalty escalates The timing certainly is interesting. After nine months without an execution, North Carolina is scheduled to kill two convicted murderers in October, just in time for Gov. Mike Easley and Attorney General Roy Cooper to reaffirm their commitment to law, order and all sorts of other conservative-for-a-Democrat principles. Barring intervention from the courts or the governor, who can reduce death sentences to life imprisonment, the state will execute Sammy Perkins early Friday and Charles Roache on Oct. 22. The timing has death penalty opponents enraged, and not just because Election Day looms. When the N.C. General Assembly convenes in January, it likely will consider stopping state executions for two years so lawmakers can study potential reforms in the way the state investigates and prosecutes potential death penalty cases. The Senate approved the moratorium in 2003; supporters said they had the votes in the N.C. House this year, but Republican Co-Speaker Richard Morgan refused to bring the bill up for a vote. "Let's just say that this all seems more about saving face and executing people for political gain than seeking justice and fairness," said Stephen Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a Carrboro-based group working to abolish capital punishment. The governor isn't involved in setting execution dates; his role is to decide whether to grant last-minute clemency. The attorney general oversees the team of state prosecutors who fight death row inmate appeals and lets the Department of Correction know when those appeals are exhausted. This year has represented an unusual reprieve for the state's inmates, the longest since Easley and Cooper took office in Jan. 2001 . The state's only execution so far this year was on Jan. 9. That gap, and its end, can be explained by more than politics, or at least, more than legislative politics. For much of this year, the state courts were holding off on handling death penalty appeals while the U.S. Supreme Court considered an appeal by an Alabama inmate who challenged the injection execution method. The court said the Alabaman could pursue his case, but opened only a narrow door to such challenges. "The system has been backlogged," said Keith Acree, spokesman for the Department of Correction. Now the backlog is about to clear, and state leaders face a conflict: Scheduling executions at the same time more people are calling for a temporary halt to them. The push for a moratorium in North Carolina echoes a national debate over capital punishment. Recent studies have shown that black people and poor people are more likely to receive a death sentence than affluent whites convicted of similar crimes. Thirty-three death row inmates nationwide have been exonerated since 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. More than 124 city and county governments across the country have called for a death penalty moratorium. That list includes more than 31 communities in North Carolina, including Charlotte. The movement to take a break from executions to study the system has gained momentum with a recent spate of cases in which prosecutorial misconduct and mistakes helped convict people who turned out to be innocent. The most embarrassing and prominent case in the Carolinas involved Alan Gell, a Bertie County man whose original death penalty conviction was overturned because prosecutors withheld evidence that could have exonerated him - after he'd spent six years on death row. Cooper, the Democratic attorney general, opted to re-try Gell. A jury found Gell not guilty earlier this year, and since his release from prison he has become an active death penalty opponent, lobbying at the General Assembly and speaking across the state to civic and church groups. Beyond Perkins and Roache, at least four other death row inmates could exhaust their appeals and receive execution dates before the General Assembly returns to work early next year. "I just don't understand how they can go ahead killing people when there's a very real chance the legislature will pass the moratorium next year," Gell said recently. "That just doesn't make any sense to me at all." Easley and Cooper have opposed a moratorium in the past. So have their Republican challengers, gubernatorial candidate Patrick Ballantine and attorney general candidate Joe Knott. Easley, a former district attorney and attorney general whose office originally prosecuted Gell, has said he does not believe North Carolina needs a halt in executions, although he was less direct in a recent interview. "There are so many different mutations of this moratorium idea that it would be hard for me to give an answer that I feel comfortable with right now," he said. "The one thing I do feel strongly about is that those who say they want a death penalty moratorium so they can study the death penalty ought to get to the business of studying it. They've been asking for a moratorium for something like six years now, and if they want to show good faith and build support, they need to start studying something." Ballantine says there's no reason to stop executions, yet has earned points with death penalty opponents, most of them Democrats, for saying that he believes the system needs to be studied. Abolitionists are angry with Easley for refusing to meet with them. Easley says there's no reason for him to sit down with anti-death penalty advocates such as Dear and legislators who oppose capital punishment every time another execution rolls around: He knows where they stand, he says, and they know where he stands. (source: Charlotte Observer)
