| Whose Charade? |
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November 16, 2011 North Carolina’s district attorneys lobby against every proposed reform to the death penalty in North Carolina. Now they are back calling on legislators to repeal the Racial Justice Act this month in a special legislative session. When earlier this year a conservative white judge was assigned to assess the constitutionality of the RJA, North Carolina’s district attorneys went to court to ask him to strike the law down. They failed. Of course, they had nothing to say about him being assigned to the case. When earlier this month the first capital case went for review under the RJA before a black judge the DAs attempted to have him removed from the case. They failed. Now our state’s district attorneys are telling the NC General Assembly to repeal the Racial Justice Act, calling it a “charade.” A letter from the NC Conference of District Attorneys to the General Assembly is full of distortions and falsities. The DAs call the RJA a “backdoor deal” to end the death penalty, the same old argument they use against every proposed reform. They say the cost of the act is prohibitive, when the study for the statistics was completed with private funding and only one state statistician will be required for the court cases. Most importantly, they ignore the historical fact that across North Carolina black citizens have been disenfranchised from their rights to serve on capital juries only because they are black—disenfranchised by the DAs themselves. Some of those cases involve white defendants with white victims and are therefore perfectly appropriate for review under the RJA. This same letter also claims that it is written “[o]n behalf of North Carolina’s 44 elected district attorneys..." but Durham County District Attorney Tracey Cline refused to sign the DAs’ letter to the NC General Assembly against the NC Racial Justice Act. She is the only district attorney in North Carolina to refuse to sign this letter. The district attorneys always deny the well-documented patterns of racial bias deeply rooted into the death penalty system they spend your tax dollars defending from reform. They call the Racial Justice Act a “charade.” This is your elected district attorney saying these things. Please click here to tell your DA that you will not tolerate this misinformation and lobbying against the Racial Justice Act. Tell your DA to do their job enforcing the law, not lobbying to change it to suit their political interests. Just click here to email your DA. In a couple of cases the elected district attorneys wants to make it difficult for you to contact them and do not provide an email address to the public. So we will pay for your message to be sent by fax. To help ensure that PFADP can continue to fight to protect the Racial Justice Act please give generously here.
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