Russell William Tucker was sentenced to death in 1996 for killing a security guard outside a Kmart in Forsyth County. He has since challenged that conviction, arguing that prosecutors relied on racist jury strikes to send Black jurors home and ensure that those who decided his death sentence were all white.
The North Carolina Supreme Court disagreed. In a ruling written by Justice Phil Berger Jr., the son of the president pro tempore of the state Senate, the high court determined that their analysis of Tucker’s case was limited because he hadn’t raised juror discrimination issues in earlier appeals, and that his “newly discovered evidence” was insufficient to clear a procedural hurdle that could allow them to grant him a new trial.
Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling was rooted in a U.S. Supreme Court decision published in 1986, Batson v. Kentucky, which found that prosecutors picking a jury in a criminal case could not use peremptory challenges — dismissing jurors without valid cause — to exclude prospective jurors solely on the basis of race.
North Carolina’s Supreme Court was the last in the South to find a Batson violation. The first time it did so was in a in a May 2020 decision — written by the then-Democratic majority — that gave lower courts guidance on how to better assess racial discrimination claims in jury selection. In 2022, for the first time in state history, the high court struck down a conviction because of discrimination against a Black juror.
Advocates worried those wins would be reversed under the conservative majority that has assumed control of the court, a fear that looks increasingly well-founded as Republican justices continue to issue rulings that find no racial discrimination in jury selections.
Tucker’s claim was based in part on a handout that listed 10 reasons attorneys can cite to legally justify peremptory challenges. Tucker’s attorneys said prosecutors used that handout to strike jurors because of their race. Berger disagreed.
“The CLE [Continuing Legal Education] handout simply displayed legally permissible reasons for exercising peremptory challenges,” Berger wrote.
The other element of Tucker’s argument was based on a study conducted by two professors at Michigan State University’s College of Law. They researched jury selection in capital cases in North Carolina between 1990 and 2010, finding that African Americans were struck at a rate 2.25 times higher than other prospective jurors in Forsyth County.
Berger said the study was “unreliable and fatally flawed” because it “assumed racial animus in cases in which defendants did not make any such claim, or in which the trial court or appellate courts did not make or sustain any such findings.”
In a statement, Henderson Hill, an attorney and board member on the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, called Friday’s ruling a step backwards from those issued in 2020 and 2022.
“Even in cases where a defendant faces execution, the court appears determined to blind itself to glaring evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection,” Hill said. “Russell Tucker, a Black man, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury because prosecutors methodically and intentionally removed every potential Black juror. I am deeply disappointed that our supreme court has chosen to ignore the evidence and allow a racist death sentence to stand.”
Others said the ruling was proof the courts will not act to spare people from death row.
“Despite evidence of widespread discrimination, our state’s highest court will not stop racist death sentences from being carried out,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Nickle called on Gov. Roy Cooper to commute the death sentences of 136 people on North Carolina’s death row before he leaves office at the end of 2024.
Source: ncnewsline.com, Staff, December 17, 2023
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