Breaking News! North Carolina Man Proves Racial Bias in Jury Selection

From the NY Times Judge Blocks Death Sentence Under Law on Race Disparity

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — Concluding that racial bias played a significant factor in the sentencing of man to death here 18 years ago, a judge on Friday ordered that the man’s sentence be reduced to life in prison without parole, the first such decision under North Carolina’s controversial Racial Justice Act.

Reading a summary of his ruling from the bench, Judge Gregory A. Weeks of Cumberland County Superior Court said that “race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by prosecutors” at the time of the trial of the inmate, Marcus Reymond Robinson. The disparity was strong enough, the judge said, “as to support an inference of intentional discrimination.”

From the jury box where they sat, the relatives of the man Mr. Robinson killed, Erik Tornblom, watched in disappointed silence. Mr. Robinson, wearing all white, was seated with his lawyers, his head lowered as the judge read his ruling.

The state said it would appeal.

The landmark ruling is expected to be the first of many under the law, which allows defendants and death row inmates to present evidence, including statistical patterns, that race played a major role in their being sentenced to death.

Over the course of the hearing, lawyers for Mr. Robinson presented the findings of a study by Michigan State University researchers showing that prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove blacks from juries more than twice as often as they used such challenges against whites. The study, which Judge Weeks called valid and reliable, found that disparity existed statewide, and to an even greater degree here in Cumberland County and in Mr. Robinson’s trial in particular.

Prosecutors, who have fiercely opposed the law since it was passed in 2009, criticized the Michigan State researchers’ methodology, but, more pointedly, they said that jury selection was a “complex discretionary system,” with thousands of possible reasons to remove a potential juror. To assume that race was the motive behind many of these decisions, prosecutors said, was not only wrong, but offensive.

“They do not have evidence of purposeful discrimination,” Rob Thompson, an assistant district attorney in Cumberland County, said in his closing arguments. “They do not have some secret society of prosecutors maniacally plotting to remove people from juries. They do not have any of that because there is no such evidence. It doesn’t exist. They have numbers.”

From the ACLU VICTORY! North Carolina Man Proves Racial Bias in Jury Selection

In a remarkable victory over racial bias in the death penalty, Marcus Robinson will not be executed by the State of North Carolina but will instead spend the rest of his life in prison after a judge ruled today that his death sentence was tainted by racial discrimination in jury selection. The central dispute in Robinson’s case, the first test under North Carolina’s new Racial Justice Act, boiled down to a fundamental question: is it fair to use statistical evidence to show racial bias in capital jury selection?

In Robinson’s case, powerful statistical evidence of racial bias in jury selection was introduced, including a study from Michigan State University finding that North Carolina prosecutors were twice as likely to remove qualified Black jurors from jury service as other jurors, even after the researchers controlled for alternative explanations such as criminal background or reservations about imposing a death sentence.

The state offered no meaningful rebuttal to the statistical evidence. No statistical expert testified for the state that race did not play a role in jury selection. Rather, the State lodged a frontal attack on the concept of statistical evidence itself. In its closing argument, the prosecution argued that the problem with the Robinson’s statistical evidence is that it tries “to get people to lose sight of the trees and focus on the forest.” At the end of the argument, the prosecution was even more direct: it pleaded with the judge not to make a decision “with respect to the Racial Justice Act based upon numbers.”

The State’s forest and trees analogy was a useful one. For years, prosecutors have been able to deny discrimination on a tree-by-tree basis — in individual cases — arguing, for example, that the real reason a Black juror was struck was because she was too old. Or too young. Or went to college. Or didn’t graduate from high school. But not that she was Black. Under the new legal standard of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, however, defendants can rely on statistical evidence from cases statewide. What statistics allowed Robinson — and all of us as citizens of North Carolina — to do was compare the prosecutors’ explanations across cases. The forest view of North Carolina jury selection is a picture of discrimination. The evidence shows unequivocally that among old people and young, college graduates and high school dropouts, single and married folks, death penalty opponents and supporters, Black jurors were struck at higher rates than their white counterparts. Statistics allowed that picture to come into crystal-clear focus.

Today, the judge applied the plain language of the statute permitting statistical evidence, and weighed all of the evidence — including the unrefuted and powerful statistics. He found pervasive evidence of bias over the last 20 years in North Carolina jury selection, and he ruled for Marcus Robison. It probably didn’t hurt that the statistical evidence confirms what all trial lawyers know to be true: race matters in jury selection. For years, it has been an open secret that prosecutors and defense lawyers strike jurors based on racial stereotypes. Both sides strike based on the view — often erroneous — that white jurors are good for the prosecutors and Black jurors are good for the defense.

The judge’s decision is an important victory for more than just Marcus Robinson. Looking back, the Robinson decision is really the first significant win since the Supreme Court dealt a blow to fairness in the death penalty 25 years ago this Sunday, ruling inMcCleskey v. Kemp that statistical evidence of systemic racial disparities could not be used to overturn death sentences because such disparities were “inevitable.” Today’s decision, and the RJA itself, stand as a powerful rebuke to the Supreme Court’s defeatist view of discrimination. It signals both that North Carolina will not tolerate a system of capital punishment built on the back of rampant discrimination and that it is possible to take systemic discrimination seriously.

The decision is also important for what is says about the future. It provides North Carolina prosecutors — and defense counsel — with an opportunity to take a hard look at the role race has played in jury selection and make the necessary changes to ensure that jury selection is no longer tainted by racial stereotyping. Should State prosecutors choose to ignore the Robinson decision, and go about business as usual in capital jury selection, they will do so at their own peril. Changes in jury selection are important for the fair selection of capital juries, but also for all of us. Discrimination in the selection of juries inflicts harm and humiliation on excluded jurors and undermines the integrity of the courts system and our democracy as a whole. Today’s judgment firmly steers us towards a future without race based jury selection, and towards a restoration of trust and integrity to the courts.

To watch a video featuring African-American jurors excluded from capital juries in North Carolina, go here.

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