New research suggests race of victim impacts NC death penalty administration

This new AP article, headlined "Researchers find race disparity in NC death cases," reports on a new study that suggests how race impacts the administration of capital punishment in the Tar Heel State.  Here are the details:

A convicted killer is three times more likely to get a death sentence in North Carolina if the victim is white rather than black, according to researchers who have found similar results in other states.

The report comes weeks before a deadline for death row inmates to challenge their status under the Racial Justice Act, a state law that allows statistical evidence to be used to support a claim that race was a key factor in a death penalty decision.  North Carolina is the second state after Kentucky to adopt such a law. It aims to prevent black defendants from being punished more harshly than whites.

The study was conducted by Michael Radelet, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Glenn Pierce, criminology researcher at Northeastern University in Boston.  They studied reports to the FBI on 14,749 North Carolina homicides between 1980 and 2007 in which victims and suspects were identified as black or white.  The researchers compared those cases against 352 death sentence cases.

A little more than 1 percent of those suspected of killing blacks were sentenced to death, compared to nearly 4 percent of those suspected of killing whites, said Radelet.  He has found similar results in studies involving capital cases in Florida and Louisiana.

Race remained an important predictor of who was sentenced to death even after statistically separating the effect of other factors, such as whether a killer took the lives of multiple victims and whether a murder was accompanied by other felonies such as rape or robbery, Radelet said Friday....

The president of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys decried the study after a brief review.  Prosecutors balance many factors when deciding whether to pursue a capital case, said Seth Edwards, the top prosecutor in Martin, Washington, Tyrrell, Hyde and Beaufort counties.   "I strongly disagree with the implication that prosecutors base their decision to seek the ultimate punishment on the race of the victim or the defendant," Edwards said in an e-mail to The News & Observer of Raleigh. "Prosecutors do not look at skin color. We consider lots of things, but race is not one of them."

Radelet said he and Pierce have studied the effectiveness of the death penalty for 30 years, often finding it wanting.  They decided to study race in North Carolina capital cases after the state's General Assembly approved the Racial Justice Act last year and there were few studies available on the subject, Radelet said.

He admits that not every factor used by prosecutors in decisions to seek death was included in his study. He said the racial disparity in death penalty convictions could be explained by other factors including prior criminal records, or whether the defendant and victim were family or strangers.

A broader study might also examine the races of the prosecutors involved in death penalty decisions, the races of the trial judges, and the races of jurors who serve in capital cases, Radelet said.