Mother of inmate, murder victim speaks at death penalty hearing

Posted on Thu, Jan. 04, 2007

Mother of inmate, murder victim speaks at death penalty hearing

GARY D. ROBERTSON

Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. - The mother of both a death-row prisoner and the victim of a recent murder urged state House members Thursday to acknowledge problems in North Carolina's capital punishment system and make changes.

Shirley Burns of Hope Mills was among 15 people who spoke during a 90-minute public hearing before the House Select Committee on Capital Punishment. Most witnesses asked panel members to urge the General Assembly to either abolish executions in North Carolina or impose a temporary moratorium.

"How many have had to sit on both sides of the table?" Burns told committee members. "I had to come to grips with myself. Where do I stand on the death penalty?"

Burns is the mother of both Marcus Robinson, who is scheduled to be executed at Central Prison on Jan. 26, and Curtis Lamar Green, who was found dead on a Cumberland County road last April. Three people have been charged in Green's death, including one accused of first-degree murder, which can carry a death sentence.

Robinson's attorneys have asked Gov. Mike Easley to stop the execution so the method of lethal injection can be studied after a botched execution in Florida last year.
Burns said she realized she needed to be consistent in her view on capital punishment: "Here I am pleading and begging for my son's life. How can I as a Christian ask for another person's life?"
The committee has been meeting since December 2005, charged by outgoing House Speaker Jim Black to examine issues related to the "accuracy and fairness" of North Carolina's death penalty. Misconduct by prosecutors and the role of race in capital cases also have been examined.
The panel will meet again to make recommendations to the state Legislature, which begins a new session in three weeks.
In 2003, the state Senate approved a two-year pause on executing death-row inmates, making it the first legislative chamber in the South to approve a moratorium. But the House didn't take up the issue that year. In 2005, a House committee approved a stay but it never got to the floor because bill supporters said there weren't enough votes.
Rep. Joe Hackney, one of the committee's leaders and a past moratorium supporter, said he doesn't "anticipate much change in the vote on that issue" in the House. But the Orange County Democrat didn't want to judge the situation before the new General Assembly is sworn in Jan. 24.
This week, a special commission in New Jersey urged its state Legislature to abolish capital punishment, saying the death penalty costs taxpayers more than paying for prisoners to serve life terms.
Others who spoke Thursday before the North Carolina committee pointed to errors in the judicial system that have led to prisoners being removed from death row after news of prosecutors withholding evidence or DNA tests showing inmates didn't commit the crimes.
"Is every judgment of the death penalty in our state fair and just? I submit it is not," said the Rev. David McBriar, a Roman Catholic priest in Raleigh who has counseled death row inmates at Central Prison. "If the answer is, 'I don't know' or 'How can I be sure' .... then in conscience you must declare a two-year moratorium until we find out."
The Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League of North Carolina said problems can be fixed without eliminating the death penalty.
"We can correct the problems within our system without failing to do our duty, which is to expedite justice as soon as possible by executing those whose hands are intentionally stained with the blood of others," Creech said.
Wayne Uber of Chapel Hill, whose twin brother was murdered in Florida in 1995, urged legislators to examine crime prevention initiatives and speed up the death penalty appeals process so that the public would more closely link crimes to the punishment.
Legislators also were asked Thursday to prohibit carrying out the death penalty on the mentally ill and to evaluate the defense attorneys of longtime death row inmates to determine whether they received effective counsel.