State v. Robinson

375 N.C. 173

846 S.E.2d 711

STATE of North Carolina

v.Marcus Reymond ROBINSON

No. 411A94-6

Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Filed August 14, 2020

Joshua H. Stein, Attorney General, by Danielle Marquis Elder, Senior Deputy Attorney General, and Jonathan P. Babb, Special Deputy Attorney General, for the State-appellee.

Cassandra Stubbs, Donald Beskind, Raleigh, David Weiss, and Brian Stull, for defendant-appellant.

James E. Coleman Jr., for Charles Becton, Charles Daye, Valerie Johnson, Irving L. Joyner, Floyd B. McKissick Jr., Cressie H. Thigpen Jr., and Fred J. Williams, amici curiae.

Jeremy M. Falcone, Paul F. Khoury, Robert L. Walker, and Madeline J. Cohen, for Former State and Federal Prosecutors, amicus curiae.

Carlos E. Mahoney, Durham, Jin Hee Lee, and W. Kerrel Murray, for NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., amicus curiae.

Janet Moore, for National Association for Public Defense, amicus curiae.

James E. Williams Jr., Carrboro, Burton Craige, Raleigh, and Bidish Sarma, for North Carolina Advocates for Justice, amicus curiae.

Grady Jessup, for North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers, amicus curiae.

Cynthia F. Adcock, for North Carolina Council of Churches, amicus curiae.

Lisa A. Bakale-Wise and Irving Joyner, Durham, for North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, amicus curiae.

Professors Robert P. Mosteller & John Charles Boger, amicus curiae.

Robert P. Mosteller, for Retired Members of the North Carolina Judiciary, amicus curiae.

Joseph Blocher, for Social Scientists, amicus curiae.

BEASLEY, Chief Justice.

On 6 August 2009 the North Carolina General Assembly, recognizing the egregious legacy of the racially discriminatory application of the death penalty in this state, enacted the Racial Justice Act (the RJA or the Act). The goal of this historic legislation was simple: to abolish racial discrimination from capital sentencing. That is, to ensure that no person in this state is put to death because of the color of their skin.

Once implemented, the RJA worked as intended. Immediately, proceedings initiated pursuant to the Act revealed pervasive racial bias in capital sentencing in North Carolina. For defendant Marcus Reymond Robinson, the first condemned inmate to have a hearing pursuant to the RJA, the trial court found that he successfully proved that racial discrimination infected his trial and sentencing.

After Robinson proved his entitlement to relief under the RJA, the General Assembly amended the statute to increase the burden of proof, thereby making it more difficult for claimants to prove racial bias and obtain relief. Nonetheless, the trial court held that the next three claimants met the higher standard and demonstrated that racial bias had infected their capital proceedings as well.

With 100% of claimants successfully proving their entitlement to relief and with more than 100 additional RJA claims filed, the vast majority of death row inmates were on the precipice of an opportunity to individually demonstrate that the proceedings in which they were sentenced to death were fundamentally flawed by racial animus. Rather than allowing these proceedings to follow their course, the General Assembly repealed the Act. The repeal was made retroactive: Robinson and the three other defendants who had already proven that their capital sentences were based on racially biased proceedings were returned to death row to await execution.

Today, we are not asked to pass on the wisdom of repealing a statutory mechanism for rooting out the insidious vestiges of racism in the implementation of our state's most extreme punishment.¹ That decision is for the General Assembly. Instead, this Court must decide whether the North Carolina Constitution allows for that repeal to be retroactive. We hold that it does not.

I.

The Racial Justice Act prohibited capital punishment if race was a significant factor in the decision to seek or impose the death penalty. North Carolina Racial Justice Act, S.L. 2009-464, § 1, 2009 N.C. Sess. Laws 1213, 1214 [hereinafter Original RJA] (codified at N.C.G.S. §§ 15A-2010, -2011 (2009)) (repealed 2013). Defendants could use statistical evidence to meet their evidentiary burden and show that race was a significant factor in the county, the prosecutorial district, the judicial division, or the state at the time their sentence was imposed. Id. , § 1, 2009 N.C. Sess. Laws at 1214.

Defendants could show that race was a significant factor by demonstrating evidence of one or more of the following: that death sentences were sought or imposed significantly more frequently upon persons of one race; that death sentences were sought or imposed more frequently based on the race of the victim; or that race was a significant factor in decisions to exercise peremptory strikes during jury selection. Id. The State could offer rebuttal evidence, including its own statistical evidence. Id. If race was found to be a significant factor, defendants were legally ineligible to receive the death penalty; instead, they were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Id.

The RJA was legislation unique to this state, most notably in its allowance of statistical evidence to prove racial discrimination. The Supreme Court of the United States has previously rejected the use of statewide statistical evidence in constitutional challenges to Georgia's death penalty scheme, finding that state legislatures "are better qualified to weigh and ‘evaluate the results of statistical studies in terms of their own local conditions.’ " McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 319, 107 S. Ct. 1756, 1781, 95 L.Ed.2d 262 (1987) (quoting Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 186, 96 S. Ct. 2909, 2931, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976) ). The General Assembly, however, recognized the difficulty of proving systemic discrimination absent statistical evidence. During the debates over the Act in the North Carolina Senate, Senator Doug Berger explained why the use of statistics was necessary, arguing that "[r]ace discrimination is very hard to prove. Rarely, particularly in today's time, do people just outright say, ‘I am doing this because of the color of your skin.’ "²

The RJA was the first law in the country to allow for a finding of racial discrimination during jury selection without requiring proof of intentional discrimination. The ability to serve on a jury is one of the many ways African-Americans have struggled to participate in our democratic processes. An understanding of the history and evolution of racial discrimination is necessary in order to understand why the RJA was passed. After the Civil War, the Supreme Court of the United States barred statutes that excluded African-Americans from serving as jurors. Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 25 L.Ed. 664 (1879). Recognizing that "[t]he very idea of a jury is a body of men composed of the peers or equals of the person whose rights it is selected or summoned to determine," the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause barred the exclusion of jurors based on their race. Id. at 308. Discrimination still occurred in practice as local jurisdictions excluded African-Americans from being in jury venires, preventing them from being in the jury pool.

The Supreme Court of the United States addressed this newest form of discrimination by prohibiting "any action of a state, whether through its legislature, through its courts, or through its executive or administrative officers" that led to the exclusion of African-American jurors. Carter v. Texas, 177 U.S. 442, 447, 20 S. Ct. 687, 689, 44 L.Ed. 839 (1900) ; see also State v. Peoples, 131 N.C. 784, 790, 42 S.E. 814, 816 (1902) ("How can the forcing of [an African-American defendant] to submit to a criminal trial by a jury drawn from a list from which has been excluded the whole of his race, purely and simply because of color ... be defended? Is not such a proceeding a denial to him of equal legal protection? There can be but one answer, and that is that it is an unlawful discrimination.").

Following these decisions, neither statutes nor local practices could legally exclude African-Americans from jury service. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, racism and legal segregation remained rampant in North Carolina and across the South. Facially race-neutral statutes, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and the "separate but equal" fallacy were instituted to legally discriminate against African-Americans. In the early 1900s, African-Americans were excluded from jury service in North Carolina through laws requiring that jurors: (1) had paid taxes the preceding year; (2) were of good moral character; and (3) possessed sufficient intelligence. See Peoples , 131 N.C. at 788, 42 S.E. at 815 ; Benno C. Schmidt Jr., Juries, Jurisdiction and Race Discrimination: The Lost Promise of Strauder v. West Virginia, 61 Tex. L. Rev. 1401, 1406 (1983) ("The problem of jury discrimination encompasses the half-century from the end of Reconstruction to the New Deal, during which the systematic exclusion of [B]lack men from Southern juries was about as plain as any legal discrimination could be short of proclamation in state statutes or confession by state officials.")

The same racially oppressive beliefs that fueled segregation manifested themselves through public lynchings, the disproportionate application of the death penalty against African-American defendants, and the exclusion of African-Americans from juries. Given the racially oppressive practices and beliefs that permeated every level of American society during the Jim Crow era, the constitutionally protected right of African-American defendants to be tried by a jury of their peers became increasingly important. The Supreme Court of the United States recognized that facially neutral statutes could violate the Fourteenth Amendment because "equal protection to all must be given—not merely promised." Smith v. Texas , 311 U.S. 128, 130, 61 S. Ct. 164, 165, 85 L.Ed. 84 (1940). The Supreme...