| Stephen Dear, guest columnist: Forsyth County needs the Racial Justice Act |
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January 25, 2012 By Stephen Dear, Guest Columnist The Winston-Salem Journal On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, about 150 people gathered at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham for a screening of the documentary "The Trials of Darryl Hunt." The award-winning film recalls the torturous series of injustices placed upon Hunt — and, ultimately, the people of Winston-Salem — for two decades by the Forsyth County District Attorney's Office and the Winston-Salem Police Department. At a forum afterward the audience was told that the Forsyth County district attorney and police withheld massive amounts of evidence pointing to the real culprit and exonerating Hunt of rape and murder. Hunt told the audience of the effects of his wrongful conviction that still pervade his life every day. Defense attorneys and law professors who work in the Forsyth County courts told the crowd that the current DA's office seems to have learned nothing from the Hunt saga. Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill recently joined other DAs — but not all of them — in a letter that pointedly misrepresents the Racial Justice Act and ignores the reasons for it. No wonder area pastors recently held a press conference calling on O'Neill to stop opposing the Racial Justice Act and come around from the misinformation and political gamesmanship that has been par for the course from most prosecutors on this issue. In fact, more than 700 pastors around the state have made similar calls in support of the legislation. The Racial Justice Act is the first real check on the influence of institutional racial bias ever in capital cases in North Carolina. Repealing the Racial Justice Act would take us back to the days of noose lapel pins awarded by district attorneys to their staffs for winning capital cases, racial epithets in capital jury rooms and police interrogation rooms (as documented in Winston-Salem) and no checks on all-white juries like the one that sentenced Hunt. Defendants charged with killing white victims in North Carolina are three times more likely to receive a death sentence than those who kill non-whites. Seventy-six percent of all people executed by the state of North Carolina have been black. Let us remember that the state of North Carolina has condemned seven men to die who were later exonerated: Glen Edward Chapman, Alan Gell, Jonathan Hoffman, Levon Jones, Samuel A. Poole, Alfred Rivera (also in Forsyth County) and Christopher Spicer spent nearly five decades on North Carolina's death row and in our prisons for murders and other crimes for which they were later exonerated. They were condemned to die because police and prosecutors illegally withheld, lost or destroyed evidence or made deals with or paid jailhouse snitches — just like in the Hunt case. Even though six of these seven exonerees are African-American and African-Americans compose 22 percent of the state's population, most of the juries of the exonerees' "peers" were all-white or nearly all-white — just like in the Hunt case. After nearly everything was taken from these men, they were released with only the clothes on their backs. No transition. No help. No apology. No money. Nothing. It has been said that the county courthouse is still the place in America least affected by the civil-rights movement. Yet despite the undeniable history of the insidious impacts of racial bias and criminal prosecutorial misconduct, without the Racial Justice Act all our system would have to rely on is a prosecutor like O'Neill admitting that racial bias affected his prosecution of a capital case. In fact, that has never happened in North Carolina. Given Hunt's experience and O'Neill's refusal to apologize or admit any fault by [his predecessors in] the Office of the Forsyth County District Attorney, for example, it is fair to say such an admission will never occur. In 2007, the City of Winston-Salem paid Hunt $1.65 million in a settlement for what the city did to him. The mayor and city council members issued an apology expressing "sincere regret, extending its profound and sincere apology to Darryl Hunt for all that he has endured and suffered in this matter." Interestingly, the city concludes its apology to Hunt by expressing "its determination to do all in its power to ensure that such a tragic series of events may never happen again." Would that the city and county's senior law-enforcement officials shared that determination. Stephen Dear is the executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a nonprofit organization located in Carrboro. The Journal welcomes original submissions for guest columns on local, regional and statewide topics. Essay length should not exceed 750 words. The writer should have some authority for writing about his or her subject. Our e-mail address is: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Essays may also be mailed to: The Readers' Forum, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. Please include your name and address and a daytime telephone number. http://www2.journalnow.com/news/opinion/2012/jan/25/wsopin02-stephen-dear-guest-columnist-forsyth-coun-ar-1851883/
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