Former Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake
This week, I. Beverly Lake, a longtime Republican and the former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, told the world that he believes the death penalty is “fundamentally unfair” and likely unconstitutional.
Lake was already the creator of the N.C. Innocence Commission, which made our state a national leader and has helped many innocent people win release from prison. Now, he has ensured his legacy as principled public servant willing to speak truth even when it’s not popular.
Lake said in his op-ed that, during his time on the court, he “vigorously advocated for the death penalty.” But he didn’t make clear just what a striking turnaround this is for a man like Lake, who comes from a long line of prominent judges who staunchly supported conservative law-and-order values.
Lake served on the N.C. Supreme Court for a year in 1992, and then again from 1995 to 2006. These were years when juries were sending record numbers of people to death row, when the Central Prison death chamber was in full swing, and before many of the systemic injustices of the death penalty were widely known.
Lake, like much of the American public, held a strong belief in the accuracy and reliability of our death penalty system.
Amid that landscape, here is Lake’s record as a N.C. Supreme Court justice:
- He voted to affirm 185 death sentences
- 120 remain on death row today
- 20 were eventually executed
- 4 were exonerated (Jonathan Hoffman, Alan Gell, Levon Jones, Glen Edward Chapman)
- 3 received clemency from the governor
- 12 were later found to have an intellectual disability, making them ineligible for execution
- Some, including Guy LeGrande and James Davis, have severe mental illness
We have to believe that, were Lake to hear these cases today, he would have voted differently in many. Just as N.C. juries are now extremely reticent to use the death penalty, Lake sent a clear message that judges must also carefully scrutinize capital cases.
He specifically points to defendants with mental illness and intellectual disabilities, who should be constitutionally protected from execution but frequently receive death sentences. He talks about the many people on death row who didn’t receive an adequate defense at trial. And he points out the case of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, two intellectually disabled teenagers who were sentenced to death and spent 30 years behind bars for a crime they did not commit.
Lake says he has “seen too much” now, and his faith in the criminal justice system is shaken. He realizes that our fallible system cannot be trusted with life and death.
He joins juries and the public in moving away from this error-prone and irreversible punishment. We have all seen too much.
Read Lake in his own words here.
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