The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned 2 death...

The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned 2 death sentences Friday, ordering a new trial in one case because of ineffective legal representation. In both cases, justices also used the opinions to admonish prosecutors for improper closing arguments that waste taxpayer money by forcing additional trials and sentencing hearings. The opinions follow a scathing ruling in 2002 also a death penalty case in which Justice Robert Orr chided Forsyth County prosecutors for failing to abide by a law which forbids prosecutors from directing abusive language at criminal defendants. A new sentencing hearing was ordered for Michael Eric Maske in the 2001 stabbing death of Geneva Yarbrough in Forsyth County. Maske admitted killing Yarbrough during a burglary. A jury sentenced him to death after evidence was presented that he stabbed the victim 16 times. The state's high court, though, ruled that Judge William Z. Wood Jr. failed to properly instruct the jury about aggravating and mitigating circumstances. The court found that Wood dropped language from the jury instructions that both prosecutors and defense attorneys had accepted. In an Edgecombe County case, a new trial was ordered for Parish Lorenzo Matthews after the court ruled that he received ineffective assistance from his lawyers. Matthews claimed that his lawyers failed to tell him that they planned to concede to jurors that he was guilty of 2nd-degree murder. He was convicted of the August 1999 death of Jessie Pettaway. In both cases, justices criticized prosecutors for making derogatory and inflammatory statements about the defendants.