In 1991, 18-year-old Marcus Reymond Robinson and a friend convinced Erik Tornblom, 17, to give them a ride home from a gas station.

Robinson and his friend then pulled a gun on Tornblom, forced him to drive to a field, took his car and his money and shot him in the head.

A jury later convicted Robinson, who is black, of pulling the trigger on Tornblom, who was white. The prosecution presented evidence that Robinson said he wanted to kill a "whitey".

He was sentenced to death and scheduled to be executed in 2007. But like many death row convicts, he has survived past that date, and continues to appeal his sentence.

Last week, he appeared in a North Carolina courtroom as the first death row inmate to present evidence under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act (RJA), a controversial law designed to compensate for bias in the judicial system.

He and his legal team are hoping the new law will offer him relief in the form of life in prison without parole.

In the process, they're putting racism itself on trial.

The Racial Justice Act (RJA) allows death penalty prisoners to use statistical patterns of injustice, not just the facts of an individual case, to prove bias.

Barbara O'Brien, a law professor from Michigan State University, studied the role of race in peremptory jury strikes in North Carolina from 1990 to 2010.


At Robinson's RJA hearing, she testified that, on average, North Carolina prosecutors in death penalty cases excluded qualified black jurors at more than twice the rate of qualified non-black jurors.

For Marcus Robinson's jury pool, qualified blacks were rejected 3.5 times more.

"Being black does predict whether or not the state will strike the potential juror, even when controlling for these other variables," she said.

The final jury seated in Robinson's case had nine white members, two black, and one Native American. The rate of black members on the jury, 18%, was not much different to that of North Carolina's black population, about 21%.

But under the RJA, the final makeup of the jury is not at issue. Instead, it's what role the state played to get to that point.

"Absent of other things, naturally the prosecution will want less blacks, defence will want more. The question is whether we should allow the prosecution to bleach juries," says Mr Baumgartner.

"Should the state, on our behalf, engage in a racially discriminatory pattern of behaviour?"
Colour blind justice?

For the family of Erik Tornblom questions about systemic bias and judicial fairness seem far removed from the death of their son. He is not a statistic, they say, and neither is his killer.

"What do people in Michigan have to do with us in North Carolina?" Patricia Tornblom, Erik's stepmother, asked after the first day in court. The family wore buttons that read "Justice is color blind".

To them, the only racial bias that matters should be the one that Robinson displayed when seeking out a white victim.

The prosecution cannot make this argument. They cannot provide details of the murder and argue that the death penalty was well deserved. They can only present their own statistics expert, as well as evidence from the judge and prosecutor in Robinson's original trial.

Both men maintain that race was not a factor in the state's jury selection process. More judges are expected to testify to similar effect.

But the Racial Justice Act fundamentally redefines the way the judicial system views racism. For years, the courts only saw racism as a deliberate act, done with malice.

The RJA says that racism has more to do with subtle shifts and built-in prejudices that permeate what should be a fair process.

"People can be motivated by race without even realising it," said defence attorney James Ferguson in his opening arguments. Later, he presented expert witnesses testifying to that same claim.

The hearing is expected to wrap up within the week, after which Judge Greg Weeks will make a ruling.

His decision as to whether or not Robinson qualifies for a new sentence will help shape the way that the law is interpreted in the future, and will reveal how far-reaching the consequences of the RJA could be for death row inmates, state prosecutors and the people of North Carolina.

Either way, his decision is expected to face appeals, and to serve as a historic moment in the ongoing debate over how American courts deal with race, justice and death.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16865531

 

-----signature-----

Not being racist really doesn't have anything to do with it. The appeal process for death-row inmates is just insane.

 

-----signature-----

Racism never works when used on whites.

 

-----signature-----

Hate crime. Burn him at the stake today.

People freed from death row after advances in DNA evidence showed they were innocent would disagree.

what ?

My point is the appeal the process takes a long time and any mistake or claim has to be recognized and it takes forever and it has nothing to do with Racism.

 

-----signature-----

If DNA evidence can get you off death row, it should be able to put you there as well.