Racism Tainted Their Trials.

North Carolina Supreme Court Hearings raise broad questions of systematic bias in the State Judicial System.Seven years ago, a judge ruled that prosecutors improperly excluded black jurors in the murder trial that put Marcus Robinson on death row.

Now the North Carolina Supreme Court has to decide whether that evidence of racial bias—and similar findings of systemic bias in a handful of related cases—must be taken into account in death penalty appeals.

The hearings stem from the 2013 repeal of the Racial Justice Act, a law that briefly allowed death row inmates to seek life sentences without parole if they could prove that racial bias tainted jury selection in their trials.

After Democrats passed the law in 2009, Robinson and three others won life sentences without parole.

But when pressure from prosecutors and a campaign of fear-mongering led the Republican-controlled legislature to repeal the Racial Justice Act, Robinson and the other three prisoners returned to death row.

The impending hearings, scheduled for late August, raise broad questions about the equity of North Carolina’s judicial system, said Cassandra Stubbs, executive director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, which is representing Robinson. “The importance of fairness and the integrity of the court is really on the line.”

And the hearings come at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court has been cracking down on racial discrimination in jury selection. In June, the court overturned the murder conviction of Curtis Flowers, a black man tried six times in Mississippi by a prosecutor who used all of his peremptory strikes against black jurors in each of the first four trials.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein declined to comment on the hearings but stressed the importance of holding defendants accountable and providing justice for victims.

North Carolina didn’t include African-American citizens in jury pools in a meaningful way until the-20th century; prosecutors then often used peremptory challenges to eliminate black jurors, according to James E. Coleman, Jr., a professor at the Duke University School of Law.

Taking black people off the jury lowers the standard of proof for the prosecutor, Coleman said, because white jurors will be more willing to accept any kind of evidence if the defendant is black.

In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that qualified jurors cannot be removed from jury pools because of their race or gender. But the North Carolina Supreme Courts has never agreed with defendants who argued that's what happened in their cases.

Marcus Robinson and a co-defendant went on trial in 1994, in Fayetteville, N.C., charged with robbing and murdering a white high-school student. The victim’s family declined to comment.

County prosecutors removed 50 percent of black jurors and less than 15 percent of white ones; the jury that convicted the two defendants had just two African-American members.

More than a decade later, the state legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, allowing death row inmates to receive commuted life sentences without parole if they could prove that racial bias influenced their death sentence.

Floyd McKissick, Jr., the bill’s sponsor, said it was fundamentally about procedural fairness—not an attempt to end capital punishment, as opponents claimed.

“It brought together people who all shared the common belief that if the death penalty was to be used in cases, then it should be free of racial bias,” he said.

Lawyers for Robinson and others on death row who had been prosecuted in Fayetteville by the Cumberland County District Attorney’s office began reviewing their jury selections.