According to a 1964 NYU Law Review article, North Carolina has kept the most complete records of executions and commutations of any other state.  Between 1903 and 1963, NC executed 358 inmates and commuted the death sentences of 235.  In 1972, following the decision of the US Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia, NC’s death penalty law was struck down as unconstitutional.  The NC General Assembly responded by passing a mandatory death penalty, which it thought would take care of any unlawful considerations.  This law was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1976. The 1977 version of NC’s death penalty law, requiring juries to balance lawful considerations, remains largely intact today, though much has happened to narrow its application and to reveal its unreliability. 

 

Since reinstatement, 42 men and 1 woman have been executed; 233 persons have been otherwise removed from death row, either through legal relief granted by the courts and the governor or by death from natural causes and suicide.   I became involved in the fight against the death penalty in 1993.  Over the next thirteen years, there was a full-on push by the State of North Carolina to obtain death sentences and to execute those on death row.  Thirty-eight men were executed, including five of my clients, but the law was reformed in a number of ways, slowing executions to a halt in 2006.

 

The reasons for the halt can be attributed largely to:  1) the release from death row of 10 NC citizens shown to be actually innocent, as well as several other innocents released from life sentences and 2) significant evidence of racially biased application of the death penalty.   The former provided a window into discovering the latter with the passage of the Racial Justice Act by NC’s General Assembly in 2009. 

 

Most of NC’s death row inmates sought relief under the Act but only four had a hearing before the Act was repealed by a reconstituted General Assembly in 2013.  The four prisoners won relief, but upon appeal by the State, their cases were returned to the lowest court.  That court returned the Four to death row.  Recently, one of the Four once again had his death sentence vacated.   The fate of the other three will soon be decided by the NC Supreme Court. 

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More information on all this can be found through the links below.