USA - North Carolina. Executions won't resume any time soon

Executions won't resume in North Carolina any time soon. Criminal justice lawyers believe that it will be a long time before North Carolina carries out an execution again, if it ever happens. North Carolina's last execution was in August 2006 and its unofficial moratorium on the death penalty started in January 2007. Legal challenges to North Carolina's capital punishment laws pending in state and federal courts have forced executions to grind to a halt. And most death row inmates filed claims under the now-repealed Racial Justice Act, which allowed them to claim discrimination in their sentencing. These legal actions are keeping the state's 150 condemned inmates away from the death chamber. "Nobody is going to be executed as long as there is a motion pending in state or federal court that has not been heard," said Robeson County District Attorney Johnson Britt. "Nobody can tell you how long it's going to be, but I would expect, given all these different levels of litigation, it's probably going to be years before we would have any executions," said retired University of North Carolina law professor Richard Rosen. Defense lawyer Ken Rose with the North Carolina Center for Death Penalty Litigation is deeply involved in the issues that have stopped executions, and believes it will take quite some time to find a solution.