Racism on trial in North Carolina

Rebellion
Verbatim Post

Don't you just love those lurid headlines?

All news organizations do, even the once-stately BBC. Here's the BBC's take on North Carolina's effort to achieve equality of outcomes between the races in criminal sentencing:

In 1991, 18-year-old Marcus Reymond Robinson and a friend convinced Erik Tornblom, 17, to give them a ride home from a gas station.

Robinson and his friend then pulled a gun on Tornblom, forced him to drive to a field, took his car and his money and shot him in the head.

A jury later convicted Robinson, who is black, of pulling the trigger on Tornblom, who was white. The prosecution presented evidence that Robinson said he wanted to kill a "whitey".

He was sentenced to death and scheduled to be executed in 2007. But like many death row convicts, he has survived past that date, and continues to appeal his sentence.

Last week, he appeared in a North Carolina courtroom as the first death row inmate to present evidence under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act (RJA), a controversial law designed to compensate for bias in the judicial system.

This raises a lot of questions. For starters, if this insidious thing called "racism" managed to infect the jury that sentenced Mr. Robinson, why isn't the entire judicial procedure likewise invalid? Why can't he simply walk?

And I wonder - if the races had been reversed, and the killer had vowed to kill a black, would there be ANY discussion about reversing a death penalty?