news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Lesley Eugene Warren, put on death row for the 1990 strangling death of a college student, alleges racial bias in his conviction and wants a court to convert his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Warren is white and so was his victim.

James Donald King, who skipped town after his arrest in the murder of his wife and was featured on “Unsolved Mysteries” and “America’s Most Wanted” in the 1990s, filed a similar motion this week.

He is black, as was his victim.

“Are you serious — oh my God,” said Tamica Underwood, the daughter of Gloria Underwood King, who was found shot in the head after leaving a bingo game with King. “I think he should stay where he’s at. He made his way there.”

The men are among at least 135 death row inmates statewide — and all four current death row inmates convicted in Guilford County — who filed motions under the state’s Racial Justice Act before Tuesday’s deadline.

The North Carolina Attorney General’s Office says it might not have received all reports of motions filed in local superior courts.

The act, signed into law Aug. 11, 2009, is one of two such state laws in the country that allows death row inmates to challenge capital prosecution on the basis of bias — which some legal advisers say can show up in jury selection or even a prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty.

“Not all of this is conscious,” said Ken Rose, a staff attorney for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham. “Not all of this is intentional discrimination ... but the statistics tell the story.”

Those motions filed in Guilford County Superior Court cite parts of two recent studies, including one by the Michigan State University Law School, which found that in North Carolina between 1990 and 1999, cases with a white victim were 2.6 times more likely to end in death sentences. In Guilford County, the defendants have been 4.1 times as likely to receive a death sentence when the victim was white.

John Henry Thompson, convicted of shooting Kenneth Bruhmuller twice in the face during a robbery inside a Domino’s Pizza store on Chapman Street in 2001, claimed prosecutors wouldn’t even accept a guilty plea in exchange for life in prison without parole.

Thompson is black. Bruhmuller was white.

Thompson’s attorney cited several examples of other local death-sentence-eligible cases in which the victims were not white and the defendants were able to avoid a capital trial.

“The logic is that under the Racial Justice Act, if you can show that at the time of your trial there was a significant disparity in the use of the death penalty by race of victim or race of defendant or in the proceeding ... you are entitled to relief,” Rose said.

A single black woman was on the jury that convicted Walic Christopher Thomas in 1996 of stabbing white UNCG student Kenny Dale Tuttle more than 30 times the year before.

At his trial, police said Thomas, who is black, went to Tuttle’s house on Holden Road about 1 a.m., knocked on the door, and asked Tuttle to call him a cab.

“They found him guilty so fast they were afraid the judge would call for a mistrial, so they waited one day to give the judge the verdict,” Tuttle’s father, Kenneth Tuttle of King, says a juror told him. “There was a black lady on the jury that found him guilty and that gave him a death sentence. There was a black lady that testified against him, that he beat her up and left her for dead … and he served time for that. He was just so mean.

“I guess if you are sitting there on death row, you’ll grab for anything that comes by,” Tuttle said.

Duke University law professor James Coleman says there is a misunderstanding of the scope of the issue. 

“That’s not to say that when you have an all-white jury, you have a jury of racists,” said Coleman, the co-director of the school’s wrongful convictions clinic. “The point is you’ve manipulated the jury to exclude a group of experiences in the community that are relevant in cases.”

That’s even in the case of Warren, the white truck driver later deemed a serial killer who strangled Katherine Noel Johnson of High Point, a white UNC-Chapel Hill student, and stuffed her nude body in the trunk of her car, according to the motion Warren’s attorney filed.

Coleman has read explanations given in not seating black jurors and said they sometimes seem made up — a black woman excluded for being the same age as the defendant when two white women of the same age are left on.

Coleman said the result of the death row racial bias motions will be a stronger legal system by ensuring juries are more reflective of the community.

“That prosecutors (in capital cases) will say we’ve just got to let a jury of different backgrounds decide, and if they decide to sentence the person to life in prison, well that’s what the law permits,” Coleman said.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com