news-record.com

As long as we allow lawsuits to be filed without consequences, this will continue to happen. It's time to mandate LOSER PAYS. It won't stop most frivolous lawsuits, but it will slow them down.

There are indeed legitimate concerns about disparities in regards to racial elements in death penalty cases, but the James King case is another one that is genuinely frivolous. What the article on the front page fails to mention in that case is that when he murdered his wife (for which he is on death row) he had not too long before been released from prison after many years for murdering his first wife in a nearly identical fashion.

"Racial Justice?"

Wouldn't that be an oxymoron! Isn't that what happened in the New Negro Panthers voting rights violation case! Isn't that what has allowed the terminally corrupt Charles Rangel to remain in the congress despite Mrs. Pelosi's promise to "drain the swamp!" I guess she meant "drain the swamp" of white, Republican reptiles!

I really like this new "post racial" America that has provided us the "new" kinds, of politician that have, changed the "old" ways of doing things , and brought us all together in a serendipitous , harmonious Utopia!

From the Hoover Institute, more racial "justice!"

"Buried deep inside the new "financial reform" law is a scheme to force affirmative action on small-business lending -- a "reform" with ominous implications for the US economy.

The new Dodd-Frank banking law sets up a data-collection system to monitor small-business loans for racial bias. Lenders must report if a business that applied for a loan is minority-owned, and whether the application was rejected."

Aimed at curtailing supposed discrimination, the race-based lending mandate is guaranteed to have perverse effects -- just like the drive for "racial fairness" in mortgage lending paved the way for the subprime crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown.

The president thinks he's just overcoming prejudice. "Less than 1 percent of the 250 billion in venture-capital dollars invested annually nationwide has been directed to the country's 4.4 million minority business owners," Obama has complained. "We are going to change that."

Yet the evidence for discrimination boils down to the fact that black-owned firms are twice as likely to have a loan application rejected as white-owned firms. (PROVING racism of course, unless you read the next pragraph!)

But that overlooks the fact that black owners are more likely to have bad credit and default on loans than white owners, as Federal Reserve data show. In fact, black owners are three times as likely to have bankruptcies and judgments against them as white owners."

Don Moore,
If you will check, the few states that have loser pays, have had a tremendous drop in frivolous lawsuits.
Tonymo, you must have been away from the news, Queen Pelosi, said she had drained the swamp.
Dodd, Rangel and Waters are corrupt o crats, so they are not crooks.

No state has a general rule of "loser pays" in civil lawsuits - so it would be hard to make the comparison.

It's too soon to know whether this law will, as the original post fears, result in wholesale changes to sentences, or whether it will end up generating a new round of motions for relief, but few actual changes. Much will depend on how it is applied by the courts, and NC's courts are pretty levelheaded about this sort of thing. Time will tell.

As a practical matter, for any number of reasons entirely unrelated to this law, there is a de-facto moratorium on executions in North Carolina. I think (subject to a better source correcting me) there has not been one since 2005 or 2006. Whether or not you believe in capital punishment, the system for it is pretty dysfunctional. Some like that, and some don't. My guess is most of the people on death row now will die there for reasons other than lethal injection, regardless.

I should have said, states with loser pay frivolous malpractice suits.
I have mixed emotions on the death penalty.
I can recall how the media went after the Duke men.
I give Doug Clark some credit on this.
He, in my opinion, did some reasoning on this.
Of course if there was any justice, Nifong would be doing life without parole.
How a guy like this could pull what it did and get away with this, is beyond me!
No is does not, he just a typical NC democratic.

The Racial Justice Act itself is not the travesty. Perhaps we can dig a bit deeper to see that the extremely lop-sided racial statistics of death row are the real travesty. The act may not be perfect, but I applaud North Carolina for forging the way in confronting this issue. Consider a white person being sentenced to death by an entirely African American jury and judge. Now does the picture look different? Even though there are some folks on death row who are allowed to use the Racial Justice Act on some pretty flimsy terms, at least it allows for death row statistics to be analyzed in the bigger picture of all cases.