Death row inmate tests North Carolina's Racial Justice Act - latimes.com: For nearly three weeks, convicted murderer Marcus Reymond Robinson has listened quietly inside a county courtroom here to intricate testimony about statistics — dry statistics that could get him off death row.
Robinson, a black man convicted of killing a white teenager in 1991, is the first inmate to test North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, the nation's only law that allows death row prisoners to reduce their sentences to life without parole by proving racial bias in jury selection or sentencing.
The act, passed in 2009, has drawn bitter condemnation from prosecutors and Republican state legislators who call it a backdoor attempt to repeal the death penalty. It allows inmates to cite statistical patterns in statewide jury selection — rather than focusing solely on their own cases — to argue that their jury selection or sentencing was racially biased.
