The New York Times reports:
Concluding that racial bias played a significant factor in the sentencing of a man to death here 18 years ago, a judge on Friday ordered that the man’s sentence be reduced to life in prison without parole, the first such decision under North Carolina’s controversial Racial Justice Act
Reading a summary of his ruling from the bench, Judge Gregory A. Weeks of Cumberland County Superior Court said that “race was a materially, practically and statistically significant factor in the decision to exercise peremptory challenges during jury selection by prosecutors” at the time of the trial of the inmate, Marcus Reymond Robinson. The disparity was strong enough, the judge said, “as to support an inference of intentional discrimination.”
