The North Carolina Racial Justice Act of 2009 prohibited seeking or imposing the death penalty on the basis of race.
North Carolina's act identified types of evidence that might be considered by the court when considering whether race was a basis for seeking or imposing the death penalty and established a process by which relevant evidence might be used to establish that race was a significant factor in seeking or imposing the death penalty.
In 2012 the North Carolina General Assembly passed a major revision of the law authored by Rep. Paul Stam (R-Wake).
The rewrite "severely restricts the use of statistics to only the county or judicial district where the crime occurred, instead of the entire state or region.
[6] On April 20, 2012, in the first case appealed under the Racial Justice Act, Judge Greg Weeks, then-Senior Resident Superior Court Judge in Cumberland County (Fayetteville), ruled in favor of the plaintiff Marcus Raymond Robinson that racial bias had influenced his case, automatically commuting his death sentence to life without parole.
Robinson's lawyers cited a study from Michigan State University College of Law indicating that prosecutors across North Carolina improperly used their peremptory challenges to systemically exclude qualified Black jurors from jury service.