A leading legislative advocate for a state death penalty moratorium sees no surge in support for the issue in 2007. Rep. Joe Hackney, D-Orange, says Democrats’ gains in the last election cycle might not help the moratorium movement.
“I wouldn’t anticipate much change in the vote on that issue,” said Hackney, who spent the past four years as House Democratic leader.
Democrats picked up five seats from Republicans in the November election. That means Democrats will hold a 68-52 House majority when the new General Assembly convenes Jan. 24.
It’s not clear that five more Democratic votes will mean five more votes for a moratorium bill, which would need 61 votes to pass the House. “I don’t want to prejudge it, but I’ll just leave it at what I said,” Hackney said. “I don’t anticipate much change [from] where it stood last session.”
Moratorium supporters have focused on the House ever since the Senate approved a two-year delay in N.C. executions in 2003. The idea stalled in the House that year, when Democrats and Republicans held an even number of votes.
Two years later, Hackney and nearly a third of the House membership signed on to H.B. 529. That measure started the legislative process as a proposal for a two-year moratorium. Legislative leaders later withdrew that plan and substituted a death penalty study bill.
The full House never voted on H.B. 529, but legislative leaders did move forward with a House Select Committee on Capital Punishment.
Hackney co-chairs the group, which has been meeting regularly since the full Assembly shut down the 2006 session. “The moratorium was not specifically a subject that we were directed to address,” he said. “Our previous meetings have not really focused on a moratorium. They’ve focused on the felony murder rule, on adequacy of counsel, on race issues — the things that we were directed to study. And we tried to be faithful to that charge.”
The study group plans to meet again to discuss its options when the legislature convenes, Hackney said. “We’ll put them on the table and see what the committee wants to do.”
Hackney is offering no predictions about death penalty changes that might win support among his House colleagues. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think you would take them one by one, and people would react to them differently depending on what each of those was.”
Regardless of the committee’s charge, most speakers at a recent public hearing pushed the study committee to adopt a moratorium. “We call our system of justice ‘criminal justice,’” Carnell Robinson of the N.C. Black Leadership Caucus said at the hearing Thursday in Raleigh. “That ought to be an oxymoron, but for capital punishment. The greatest punishment that we can inflict on human beings is a crime when committed by an individual. It cannot be a virtue.”
Speaker Shirley Burns lost one son to murder. Another son is a condemned prison inmate. “Let’s not let another innocent soul suffer death only to discover after his death that: ‘Oops, we made a mistake.’”
Moratorium opponents also made their case. “Don’t just think only in terms of study, medicate, rehabilitate, or incarcerate,” said Wayne Uber, a Chapel Hill man who lost his twin brother to a shooting death in 1995. “I urge you guys to experience the real world first. You’re not looking through the eyes of a victim if you vote for or you suggest a moratorium.”
The death penalty debate could hinge on the outcome of the House speaker’s race. Hackney is one of as many as a half-dozen candidates seeking the speaker’s job. The speaker will determine who chairs the committees that consider any recommendations from the Select Committee on Capital Punishment.
Democrats plan to caucus Wednesday to select their candidate for speaker. If the caucus unites behind a single candidate, Democrats have enough votes to select the speaker Jan. 24.
Mitch Kokai is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.