USA - North Carolina. Court to Hear First Challenge under State's Racial Justice Act: the case of Marcus Robinson, 34, black

Court to Hear First Challenge under State's Racial Justice Act. Marcus Robinson, 34, black, will be the first North Carolina death row inmate to have a sentencing challenge heard in court based on the state's 2009 Racial Justice Act. According to the act, a death row inmate who can establish through statistical studies that his sentence was racially discriminatory can seek to have it commuted to life in prison.  Robinson's lawyers plan to argue that he received a death sentence partly because he is black and his victim was white  They plan to cite several North Carolina studies, including one that found that a defendant who killed a white victim was 2.6 times more likely to be sentenced to death than if there were no white victims in the crime. His lawyers will also cite statistics showing that prosecutors in the state reject minorities for capital juries at twice the rate they reject whites. In Robinson's case, the prosecutors rejected half the potential jurors who were black but only 15 percent of potential jurors who were other races. His sentencing jury was comprised of nine whites, one American Indian and two blacks, plus two white alternates. The Racial Justice Act was challenged in the state's prior legislative session, but it was upheld. Nearly everyone on death row in North Carolina - 151 out of 158 convicts - is pursuing Racial Justice Act claims. Robinson is the first to have a hearing date set before a judge, according to the nonprofit Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which is representing him. Gregory Weeks, a senior resident Superior Court judge, is scheduled to hear the arguments Sept. 6. Robinson was sentenced to death in Cumberland County Superior Court in 1994 for the June 1991 death of Erik Tornblom, 17, white, during a robbery. (As for the Racial Justice Act, see also Aug. 11, 2009).