The Republican governor of North Carolina on Wednesday signed the repeal of a law that allowed inmates on death row to change their sentence if they could prove racial bias, Reuters reported.
The law, passed in 2009 and known as the Racial Justice Act, had enabled four inmates to have their sentences shifted to life without parole. North Carolina was the only state in the country with such a law on the books.
Although there are 152 North Carolina inmates on death row — 80 of whom are black — the law had prevented the state from executing anyone since 2006, something that Gov. Pat McCrory (R) described as “procedural roadblocks.”
“The state’s district attorneys are nearly unanimous in their bipartisan conclusion that the Racial Justice Act created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice,” McCrory said, according to Reuters.
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) criticized the move by McCrory.
