Race is critical factor in death penalty cases
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
By Chris Fitzsimon
By Alex Keown Daily Times Staff Writer
RALEIGH — A black man is more likely to be given the death penalty than a white man, a panel of law professors said Monday afternoon.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 at a luncheon sponsored by N.C. Policy Watch and N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium of the state’s death penalty, the panelists said statistics show that a black man is more likely to be sentenced to die for killing a white man, than a white man is for killing a black man.
Rep. Jean Farmer-Butterfield, a Wilson Democrat, has been a longtime proponent of a two-year moratorium on capital punishment in North Carolina. She said the issue is important to the Legislative Black Caucus, of which she’s a member.
"I started working on this back in 1989, trying to get the state to change the way it administered the death penalty for mentally handicapped people and it took more than 10 years for that to change," said Farmer-Butterfield who works for the ARC of North Carolina.
"With the flaws that we’re finding in the way the penalties are being handed down, we need to hold off and see what we need to do," she added.
Jack Boger, dean of the law school at the University of North Carolina said a statistical analysis of the death penalty conducted over a five year period in the 1990s indicate a racist trend in how the death penalty is applied. He said his study shows that the race of the victim matters. (more…)
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