Death row inmates take race bias claims to Supreme Court

Four death row inmates from some of the Fayetteville area’s most-notorious homicides this week continued their years-long battle to avoid the death chamber.

Their lawyers filed motions with the North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday. They contend their constitutional rights against double-jeopardy were violated when their death sentences were reinstated in 2015 after a judge in 2012 removed them from death row under the North Carolina Racial Justice Act.

Double-jeopardy is a legal concept the nation’s founding fathers put into the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to prevent the government from abusing its power over the people. It says a person can’t be prosecuted more than once for the same crime if he’s been acquitted.

The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the amendment to mean that once a person is cleared from a death sentence for a particular crime, the death sentence can’t be reimposed later.

A spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, whose office has been opposing the inmates’ efforts, declined comment because the case is pending.

The four inmates are Marcus Reymond Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters and Tilmon Golphin.

Robinson killed a teen in a robbery in 1991.

Augustine was convicted of killing a Fayetteville police officer in 2001. He contends he is factually innocent and was wrongly convicted.

Walters led a gang that randomly kidnapped and killed two women in 1998 in a gang initiation ritual.

Golphin and his brother killed a Cumberland County deputy and a state trooper in a traffic stop in 1997.

Juries sent all four inmates to death row.

Then in 2009, North Carolina passed its Racial Justice Act. The act said that if a death row inmate could produce evidence to persuade a judge that racism was a factor in his prosecution, conviction or sentence, he had to be removed from death row and resentenced to life in prison without parole.

Nearly every death row inmate in the state sought to use the law.

In 2012, lawyers for Robinson, Augustine, Walters and Golphin persuaded a Cumberland County judge that black jurors were illegally blocked from serving on their juries. The judge commuted their sentences.

The state appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court. That court in 2015 said the Cumberland County judge had made errors in how he conducted his Racial Justice Act hearings and the state deserved a new chance to make its case. The four inmates were returned to death row.

And meantime, the legislature repealed the Racial Justice Act. The law had been highly controversial and attracted more criticism when these four inmates were removed from death row. These four are the only ones to come off death row under the Racial Justice Act.

When the four inmates tried to use the law to again be removed from death row, the judge said they couldn’t.

So now they are back before the North Carolina Supreme Court.

The inmates have additional arguments that other rights under law and under the constitution were violated when their death sentences were reinstated.

Several organizations and individuals have filed briefs on behalf of the inmates, the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said in a news release that announced the inmates’ latest effort.

These include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People of North Carolina, the N.C. Association of Black Lawyers, the N.C. Council of Churches and the N.C. Advocates for Justice. A group of former prosecutors also filed a motion on behalf of the defendants.

Former Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley is among those prosecutors.

“Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, we should all agree that execution can never be an option when racial stereotypes are used to keep black citizens off capital juries. No civil right is more basic than this,” he said in the news release.

Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com or 486-3512.