Another article about North Carolina Tour stops, this one at Wake Forest University:

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2010/mar/31/wfu-forum-to-examine-race-relative-to-sentences-by/news/

WFU forum to examine race relative to sentences

Murder, Race, Justice: Read the original series

By Michael Hewlett

JOURNAL REPORTER

Published: March 31, 2010

Of the 157 people on death row in North Carolina, 86 -- or 55 percent -- are black.

And according to several studies, defendants accused of killing whites are more likely to get the death penalty than those accused of killing blacks.

For some people, those statistics confirm their view that race plays a part in who is sentenced to death and who isn't, and it's one reason that supporters of the state's Racial Justice Act pushed for its passage last year.

Those issues will be discussed today at Wake Forest University School of Law during a forum on "Race, Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty."

Carol Turowski, a co-director of the law school's Innocence and Justice Clinic, said that the issues are closely linked.

"I think these three issues intersect on a variety of different levels," Turowski said. "It's important to have a presentation to have them all discussed in an open forum with people who have experience with the Racial Justice Act."

Wake Forest is the first of four schools that will hold forums over the next month as part of a national tour. Today's forum is sponsored by the Innocence and Justice Clinic, the N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, which is organizing the tour. The other three schools are UNC Chapel Hill, Fayetteville State University and N.C. A&T State University.

Death-penalty opponents have long argued that there is a racial disparity when it comes to the punishment. In 2001, a major study by two UNC professors found that defendants whose victims were white were 31/2 times more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants whose victims were black.

In Winston-Salem, Darryl Hunt, who faced the death penalty in his first trial but was sentenced to life, spent nearly 19 years in prison for murder before being exonerated in 2003 after DNA evidence pointed to another man. Hunt was accused of killing Deborah Sykes, a white copy editor for The Sentinel, a now-closed afternoon newspaper, in a case that was racially charged.

"Darryl was only a vote away from the death sentence," Turowski said. "You realize how closely linked he could have been to the death penalty."

Hunt will be one of the speakers at Wake Forest. He will be joined by the keynote speaker, Stephen Bright, the president and senior counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Mark Rabil, who was Hunt's attorney and is now a co-director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic.

State Reps. Larry Womble and Earline Parmon will also speak. They pushed for passage of the Racial Justice Act.

The new law, which Gov. Bev Perdue signed in August, allows defendants facing the death penalty or who are already on death row to use statistics and other evidence to prove racial bias in how the death penalty is applied.

"The passage of this reform was incredibly historically significant," said Tarrah Callahan-Ledford, the campaign coordinator for the N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium. "Our intent on this tour is to continue public education on the Racial Justice Act."

The law was hotly debated last year, with prosecutors from across the state largely opposed to it. They argued that capital cases should be decided on facts and not historical patterns and statistics. And they argued that the new law was a way to end the death penalty.

The state hasn't conducted any executions since August 2006 because of several legal challenges that have mostly been resolved by recent court rulings.

It isn't clear how the Racial Justice Act will play out in courtrooms throughout North Carolina. In Forsyth County, all capital cases have been put on hold until a study comes out this summer that looks at race and the death penalty.

Turowski said that while executions are on hold, this is the perfect time to closely examine the issue of race and how it affects wrongful convictions and the death penalty.

"Keeping it at the forefront is a critical thing for us to do as a culture, as a country, as a community," she said.

mhewlett@wsjournal.com

727-7326

For more information, go to http://law.wfu.edu/news/release/2010.03.23.1.php