North Carolina ACLU Challenges Death Qualification of Jurors as Racially and Sexually Discriminatory

Lawyers for a North Carolina capital defendant have filed a sweeping challenge to the method by which death-penalty jurors are empaneled, arguing that the combination of a process known as “death qualification” and discretionary jury strikes produces a jury so racially and sexually unrepresentative that it violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial.

Death qualification refers to the process of removing potential jurors from service in a capital case because of their expressed opposition to the death penalty. On August 16, 2022, the ACLU of North Carolina filed a motion on behalf of Brandon Xavier Hill (pictured), who faces the death penalty for a double murder in Wake County, North Carolina, to bar that practice. In support of that motion, Hill’s lawyers presented two days of evidence on August 29 and September 1, 2022 to Judge Paul Ridgeway, including the results of a Michigan State University study of jury selection in ten Wake County capital trials between 2008 and 2019 that documented significant racial and gender disparities caused by the death-qualification process.

The study, conducted by law professors Catherine M. Grosso and Barbara O’Brien, involved more than 1,200 prospective jurors. The researchers found statistically significant evidence of racial disparities in death qualification, with Black potential jurors removed “at 2.27 times the rate of their white counterparts.”

Collectively, the combination of death qualification and discretionary strikes produced two cases with no Black jurors and four with only one Black juror.

Lawyers for Mentally Ill Oklahoma Death-Row Prisoner Seek Clemency, Competency Trial

Lawyers for Oklahoma death-row prisoner Benjamin Cole have filed a petition with the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Parole asking the Board to recommend to Governor Kevin Stitt that Cole’s sentence be commuted to life without parole.

The petition, submitted to the board on September 16, 2022, states that “Benjamin Cole today is a frail, 57-year-old man with a damaged and deteriorating brain, suffering from progressive and severe mental illness who poses no threat to anyone in any way.” Cole, who faces an October 20, 2022 execution date, is the third of 25 death-row prisoners Oklahoma has scheduled to put death between August 2022 and December 2024, in an execution spree without parallel in the state’s history.

Cole, whom the petition describes as “wheelchair bound” and “catatonic,” suffers from a combination of brain damage resulting from multiple childhood and early adulthood head traumas and a family history of mental illness exacerbated by repeated physical and sexual abuse as a child that also led to persistent alcohol and drug abuse. Medical imaging, the petition says, shows that Cole has “a sizable, observable … lesion” in an area of the brain associated with paranoid schizophrenia, and also exhibits symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease.

Thomas Hird, one of the federal defenders representing Cole, said in a statement accompanying the clemency filing that Cole’s severe mental illness and brain damage “leave him with no rational understanding of why the State seeks to execute him.” Cole’s mental health “has deteriorated dramatically over his years in solitary confinement, and he is now so physically compromised that he can barely move,” Hird said. “He is not a threat to anyone, and his execution would be both unconstitutional and unconscionable.”

Cole’s lawyers also have filed a petition in a Pittsburg County court — where Oklahoma’s death row is located — seeking a jury trial on his competency to be executed. The court is expected to issue a ruling on that petition on September 30. Cole’s clemency hearing is scheduled for September 27.

In an interview with Fox Oklahoma City affiliate KOKH, Brett Farley, chair of Oklahoma Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said “When you have death row inmates that have serious mental competency questions at any point in the process, … it behooves us to take a step back and question what we're doing here.” “We cannot be a state that...values the sanctity of life, and, at the same time, think that we can have a system of justice that resorts to death,” Farley, the former director of communications for the Oklahoma Republican Party, said.

Purchase merchandise or make a Donation today!…