Racism and the Death Penalty: The Intertwined Ropes of the Lynchman’s Noose - Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty

In this Chapter

Historical Overview
Death Row Profile: Tilmon Golphin
A New Generation of Prosecutors is Saying No to the Death Penalty
The Fight for Black Lives in the North Carolina State Courts
Reflections on McCleskey v. Kemp
Racism and the Death Penalty: The Intertwined Ropes of the Lynchman’s Noose

The following are excerpts from an op-ed published in USA Today.

The link between slavery, Jim Crow, lynching and the death penalty is as connected as the intertwined ropes of the lynchman’s noose. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ushered in the modern death penalty in the case of Gregg v. Georgia, ruling that capital punishment was “essential.” Without it, the court said, citizens would turn to “self-help, vigilante justice and lynch law.” Essentially, the court charged the criminal justice system with a job once left to mobs with a noose.

Just as African Americans were once disproportionately lynched, they are now disproportionately represented on death row. Defendants convicted of killing whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks, and prosecutors routinely exclude black citizens from capital jury service. Forty years after establishing the modern death penalty, we have professionalized and proceduralized the path to execution, but we cannot wash away the stain of racism.

North Carolina must decide: Will its people leave the legacy of lynching firmly in place? Or will they have the moral courage to finally end a death penalty deeply and irretrievably rooted in racism.

A flag outside NAACP headquarters in the early 20th century.

For far too long, the nation has lived with the lie that we can construct a legal machinery capable of deciding who lives and dies with fairness and without racism.

North Carolina must decide: Will its people leave the legacy of lynching firmly in place? Or will they have the moral courage to finally end a death penalty deeply and irretrievably rooted in racism.

Rev. William J. Barber II is an American Protestant minister and political activist who is the President and Senior Lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. From 2006-2017, Rev. Barber served as President of the NAACP’s North Carolina state chapter, the largest in the South and second largest in the country. He has been the lead pastor at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, since 1993. Photo of Rev. Barber by Phil Fonville.

Next – The Death Penalty in the Age of Mass Incarceration (1990-Present)

In the 1990s, the old forces of racism took a virulent new form: mass incarceration. Politicians competed to varnish their “tough on crime” credentials. They embraced the myth of young, Black “superpredators” and waged the War on Drugs. Thanks in large part to the policies of this period, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

The death penalty roared back to life, assuming a symbolic role at the apex of this system. In 1992, Presidential candidate Bill Clinton left off campaigning in New Hampshire to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man so brain damaged and intellectually disabled that he asked the guards serving his final meal to save dessert so he could eat it the next day.

North Carolina’s death sentencing rate soared to one of the nation’s highest, even beating out Texas. At the height of the frenzy, juries handed down as many as thirty-four death sentences in one year.

North Carolina led the death penalty’s resurgence. Its courts adopted the country’s most expansive death penalty rule, requiring prosecutors to seek the death penalty for nearly every first-degree murder. North Carolina’s death sentencing rate soared to one of the nation’s highest, even beating out Texas. At the height of the frenzy, juries handed down as many as thirty-four death sentences in one year, as opposed to no more than one or two per year today.