Death penalty foes find home in N.C.

North Carolina is at the forefront of the death penalty moratorium movement, according to local and national activists who convened at the annual conference of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in Raleigh this past weekend.

NCADP Communications Director David Elliott said the conference's location was appropriate because the state serves as the center of the nation's moratorium movement.

"[Questions of] racial equity, class equity, possible innocence and proportionality are all being debated across the U.S., but the debate is louder, more vibrant [and has] a richness in North Carolina that you don't find elsewhere," Elliot said.

Seventy percent of North Carolinians would support a moratorium if potential death row inmates could receive a sentence of life without parole, according to a poll conducted by the News and Observer last year.

North Carolina currently leads the country with 14 municipalities that have passed resolutions calling for a moratorium.

In order to achieve its goal of a state moratorium, the movement lobbies legislators to vote against the death penalty on both the state and local levels.

"We're going after legislators execution by execution, letting them know that people are being executed in our name and asking them, OIs this a fair system?'" said Ted Frazer, a member of the Charlotte Coalition for a Moratorium Now.

This summer, the movement scored a major victory in the state legislature with the passage of a ban on executions of the mentally retarded. Steve Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, applauded the new law, which is retroactive. "[The law] literally saves the lives of more than a dozen people on death row, and reflects a rising standard of decency," he said.

Another law passed this summer allows prosecutors trying first-degree murder cases with aggravating circumstance to seek sentences other than the death penalty.

Activists are now working to pass a law that would call for a day in court devoted to evaluating any potential racial motivation behind a local prosecutor's decision to pursue the death penalty. Defendants whose victims are white are 3.5 times more likely to receive a death sentence in the state, according to an April study conducted by two professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, Dear reported that three-quarters of the state's executed are African-American.

Moratorium supporters are also pursuing an execution ban for individuals convicted of a felony-murder, who were accessories to the murder.

Dear cited the Oct. 12 execution of David Junior Ward, convicted for the 1991 killing of a Greenville convenience store owner, as an example in which a "less culpable" offender was put to death while his partner received a life sentence. Dear blamed a disparity in resources for hiring legal defense as the cause of the different sentences.

"The most glaring problem with capital punishment is that those without the capital get the punishment," Dear said.

Moratorium advocates stressed that because inequity still exists in the application of death sentences, their members do not all necessarily support the abolition of the death penalty.

"Even if you believe in [the death penalty] theoretically, you could not support how it's being imposed," said Marshall Dayan, president of PFADP.

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