If you can’t support your argument with raw facts, cook them up at a high temperature and add a heaping tablespoon of fear.
At least, that’s the way some members of North Carolina’s right wing seem to operate. This morning’s News & Observer in Raleigh reports that “most of the state’s district attorneys and Republicans in the General Assembly” are yelling that the N.C. Racial Justice Act could lead to numerous death-row inmates being set free on parole.
“Assuming just one defendant does win under their interpretation of the statute, you can apply that to every other case,” Forsyth County District Attorney Mike Silver tells the N&O‘s Craig Jarvis. “There are approximately 119 inmates who could make the same argument.”
Never mind the unlikelihood of that outcome. “The chances are zero,” Robert Mosteller told Jarvis.
Mosteller should know. An associate dean at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Law, he co-authored an exhaustive 2010 N.C. Law Review article, “The Racial Justice Act and the Long Struggle with Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina.” He also litigated the precedent-setting case of death-row inmate John Wesley Oliver, who was re-sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001. Mosteller calls the anti-Racial Justice Act arguments “frivolous. It is completely political.”
Other experts on the Racial Justice Act agree, according to the N&O story:
Supporters of the bill note that the wording in the Racial Justice Act is clear that the only result of a successful claim is life without parole . . . Supporters of the act insist prisoners give up their right to argue for parole once they pursue a claim under it. N.C. Prisoner Legal Services, for instance, pledges it will not represent inmates seeking to set aside a life without parole sentence obtained under the act, because it would be frivolous.
Read the full story here.
For more on the Racial Justice Act, you can download Mosteller’s N.C. Law Journal study here.
This article appears in Dec 27, 2011 – Jan 2, 2012.
This law has cost taxpayers millions of dollars as public defenders use it to appeal virtually every single inmate on death row.
This is a rather dishonest article. The author – with no proof at all – labels “most of the state’s district attorneys” as “right-wing fear-mongers”. Then he weakly tries to dismiss the concerns of this large body of publicly-elected law enforcement experts by making one phone call to the epitome of an East Coast liberal: a Yale/Harvard boy who now pontificates from his ivory tower at taxpayer expense.
The Racist Injustice Act is an abomination simply from the standpoint of long-held legal traditions inasmuch as it seeks to ignore and suppress the facts of the actual case at hand in search of irrelevant alleged “biases” from past cases that involved different defendants, different attorneys, different victims, different juries and different judges.
Hopefully the first killer freed by the Racist Injustice Act will be released into Robert Mosteller’s gated community.
The Racial Justice Act is releasing killers on parole, The President was born in Kenya, The government is convening death panels as a result of the new health care law, Saddam has WMDs, President Obama attends a Baptist church run by a racist preacher, President Obama is close friends with a terrorist, President Obama is actually a Muslim, State Courts are considering Sharia Law…
I think I see a pattern of lies developing on the right.
Mallard Fillmore, what is “dishonest” about pointing out that “the wording in the Racial Justice Act is clear that the only result of a successful claim is life without parole”? What part of the wording of the law do conservatards like yourself not understand? The results that these supposedly bright prosecutors are so afraid of are results that CANNOT HAPPEN, according to the very law they’re pitching a fit about. The truth is that attempts to overturn the law have nothing to do with fear of “releasing murderers” and everything to do with using race as a fear-mongering tool in order to lighten prosecutors’ work load. Nothing more, and nothing less.