NC Supreme Court court OKs jury exclusion by race

North Carolina's Supreme Court ruled against a death row inmate who alleges prosecutors illegally struck Black jurors from his murder trial.

People convicted by an all-white jury in North Carolina have less recourse to appeal race-based exclusions.

The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled on Dec. 15 there was no evidence of racism in the case of Russell Tucker, a Black man sentenced to death in 1996 by an all-white Forsyth County jury for the murder of Maurice Williams. The justices ruled that the prosecutor’s striking every Black person from the jury pool with excuses from a training document that skirt laws barring race-based strikes was permissible.

The ruling, anti-death penalty advocates say, ignored Forsyth County’s history of striking Black jurors from capital trials at three times the rate of white jurors.

“For most of its history, North Carolina has utterly failed to ensure that all citizens have the right to serve on juries, regardless of their race,” Henderson Hill a capital defense from Charlotte and board member of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation said in a statement. “It took until 2022 for our state Supreme Court to finally strike down a single criminal conviction due to the exclusion of Black jurors. That historic decision gave many of us hope that our state was finally ready to tackle the persistent problem of people of color being denied a voice in our courtrooms. However, it’s clear from [the] ruling that North Carolina’s highest court has gone backward once again.”  

In a ruling written by Justice Phil Berger Jr., son of state Senate president pro tempore Phil Berger, the Republican-dominated court determined Tucker’s claim was limited because he didn’t claim juror discrimination in previous appeals, and his claim didn’t clear a procedural bar that could result in a new trial.

“The message of this ruling could not be more clear: Despite evidence of widespread discrimination, our state’s highest court will not stop racist death sentences from being carried out,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “As a result, we call on Gov. Cooper more urgently than ever to use his power to commute North Carolina’s 136 death sentences to prison terms before he leaves office.”

Cooper, who is term-limited, leaves office in December 2024. Samuel Flippen was the last person executed in North Carolina when he was killed by lethal injection on Aug. 18, 2006, at Central Prison. Since then, litigation over execution procedures and the Racial Justice Act put executions on hold. There is no official moratorium on executions in North Carolina.

Research shows that all-white juries are more likely to convict and more frequently sentence defendants in capital trials to death, including people who are later found to be innocent. Twelve people have now been exonerated in North Carolina, including 11 men of color. North Carolina has the fifth-largest death row in the United States and nearly half were sentenced by overwhelmingly white juries.

“Even in cases where a defendant faces execution, the court appears determined to blind itself to glaring evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection,” Hill said.

In April, the state supreme court upheld two other defendants’ convictions after affirming racial exclusion of jurors, including a case where the prosecution dismissed a woman who supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
Anti-death penalty advocates have pushed for elimination of capital punishment in North Carolina and, since 2021, have campaigned to demand Gov. Roy Cooper commute the sentences of everyone on death row. The campaign is supported by civil rights groups, clergy relatives of people who were murdered.

Governors in Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana have recently commuted death sentences and ban executions.  

“It’s time for North Carolina to leave the unjust and discriminatory death penalty in the past,” Nickle said. “Rather than relying on an outdated punishment that has no effect on reducing violence, we ask Gov. Cooper to lead us to a new vision of justice that restores communities and increases public safety.”  

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