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In the fight on crime, death is far more costly than life
Almost every time people discuss the death penalty on social media, at least one person chimes in with this opinion: We should execute people because it’s too expensive to keep them in prison for life....
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After idle years, execution chambers crank up
North Carolina just passed its 11th year without an execution, which might make it easy to believe the death penalty is no longer an issue here. The national news in recent weeks should jolt us out of...
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Keith Tharpe is not an anomaly. Lots of death row inmates have been called...
Justice should be color-blind. Last week, the Supreme Court halted the execution of Keith Tharpe in Georgia because of a juror’s admission that he voted for death because he believed Tharpe was a...
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A juror’s dilemma: The wrenching job of deciding another person’s right to live
In a federal courtroom in Greensboro last week, attorneys were parsing a single conversation between a juror and a religious adviser, which took place during a capital trial more than 20 years earlier....
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Time to move on: Calls for death penalty fall flat in N.C.
Time to shelve the outdated death penalty rhetoric Maybe you heard that N.C. legislative leaders called last week for executions to return to North Carolina. It’s one of the oldest political tricks in...
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An execution’s aftermath: “I watched him die 15 years ago, and I still talk...
Gretchen Engel holding a painting by her executed client, Quentin Jones. By Gretchen M. Engel I watched him die 15 years ago, and I still talk to him sometimes. I talked to him a lot in the weeks after...
View ArticleRemaining human in the face of an inhumane death penalty system
It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be a capital defense attorney. To be responsible for saving the lives of people who’ve committed terrible crimes, and sometimes, to be forced to watch them...
View ArticleWhy most of N.C.’s death row inmates never should have gotten the death penalty
After 12 years without an execution, many people believe the North Carolina death penalty is dead. That might be true — if it weren’t for the more than 140 people still on death row. Our state...
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Why justice matters, even for my guilty clients
Last week, a case in Buncombe County perfectly illustrated the problems with N.C.’s decades-old death sentences. By today’s laws and standards of justice, most of the people on death row simply...
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Why we’re winning the fight against the death penalty in North Carolina
Sometimes, the fight to end the death penalty can feel like a long, slow slog. But we’ve got good news. We are winning! In 2018, for the second year in a row, juries didn’t hand down any new death...
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