What follows is a transcript of the first portion of YES! Weekly reporter Keith T. Barber's Aug. 19 interview with Forsyth County DA Tom Keith:
Keith T. Barber: “Could we start with your reaction to the General Assembly’s [passage of the Racial Justice Act? We did talk about it on the phone. I just wanted to make sure I had your thoughts on that correctly. You said you were involved with and you are involved with talking to legislators on a regular basis. Did you speak with any of our elected officials before [the Racial Justice Act] was presented?”
Tom Keith: “I wrote people; I know I wrote everybody in the Senate.”
Keith T. Barber: “This would be [Sen. Linda] Garrou and [Sen. Pete] Brunstetter?”
Tom Keith: “Right, right. I mean, all, however many members there are in the Senate, 50 or 60. Some of them, it’s a lost cause. There’s no reason to talk to some people. The House is purely political — R’s and D’s. And it ended up I think being carried to a point. It came down to the final votes. Unfortunate — that’s just the nature of our Congress and our General Assembly. Everything seems to be one team or the other. [Inaudible] I know their positions and why even talk to them?
“To us, the General Assembly makes laws, all right? They have no idea what we do, like you do about the death penalty — extremely complex. We started in ’76; in ’76, they said, ‘Well, there are certain cases that don’t merit the death penalty.’ So all of a sudden, we have to come back nationwide and each state had to come up with, ‘How do we decide which are garden variety murder cases and which are capital cases?’”
“Somewhere in here is, out of a hundred murder cases, only three end up as capital. How do you winnow out, where before they were all subject to the death penalty? When I started practicing law, the death penalty was for murder, rape; there were no degrees of rape, arson and first-degree murder. Now, the only thing that’s survived nationally is first-degree murder. So that cuts down our number of cases.
“We passed [NCGS] 15A-2000, which you can read online, that has aggravating and mitigating factors. It says the state has to have one of these 11 aggravating factors to make the case capital; most of our murders are garden variety murders. They are not capital murders. Capital must be beyond a mere drink house fight, something extraordinary the Supreme Court says and there are details about punishment.
“So we start out with the factors and the next step for us is, the legislature has created this problem and they don’t want to take the responsibility. They want to say, ‘Oh, the DA’s are putting too many people on death row.’ Well, who made the 11 aggravating factors — the General Assembly.
“One of the aggravating factors is, you have a prior crime of violence. That is a very valid aggravating factor; you rob somebody, armed robbery; you rape somebody, you commit burglary. Violent felonies are what is called A-3 felonies; A is murder; E is armed robbery; they are crimes which hurt people as opposed to property crimes, rape, embezzlement; so if you have one of those, studies suggest that…there’s 11 of those — killing a cop.
“If you want to change the number of people, the people on death row, then you change these factors because there is documentation here. Look online, Bureau of Justice Statistics has all this data, this entire [inaudible] data which are monographs from statistics put out by the federal government. I don’t make up any of this stuff.
“They say if you kill a cop it’s an aggravating factor. Well, going back to if you have a violent crime; in one of these monographs, if you’re an African-American, you’re six, seven or eight times, or some figure more likely to have a violent history. I didn’t go out there and put a gun in your hand and say, ‘You commit eight crimes and I’m a white man, I’ll commit one.’ That’s just statistics, that’s how it is.
“If you kill a cop, one of these documents says 82 percent of cops who are killed are white. So, you’re saying, ‘Gee, blacks are three times more likely to get the death penalty for killing a white than vice-versa.’ If one of those types of cases is killing a cop, then suppose that was the only aggravating factor you had. Blacks are six, seven, or eight times more likely to kill a cop than vice-versa, than a white killer.
“So that’s a factor they can adjust, but as one of the local newspapermen says, ‘I’m not going to write an editorial saying that killing a cop should not be an aggravating factor.’ But for whatever reason in our culture, blacks are vastly overrepresented , in the data, are overrepresented for killing cops.”
Keith T. Barber: “That’s just one example?”
Tom Keith: “Right, and there are these 11 other factors.”
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