A Revived Death Penalty?

For the last 19 years, North Carolina has been in a death penalty limbo. It is on the books, but the death chamber has been shuttered since 2006, the year of the state’s last execution. For years, neither political party made definitive moves to either repeal it or resurrect it. 

But on Friday, Gov. Josh Stein signed Iryna’s Law, a bill named after Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death in August on a Charlotte light rail train. Republican state legislators hope the law will restart executions. 

Legal experts, however, say executions won’t be starting anytime soon. 

The law does several things Republicans believe will remove major barriers to restarting the death penalty: the increasing cost of obtaining lethal injection drugs and the legal battles over the role of medical professionals in executions. 

The law removes a state prohibition against electrocution and lethal gas, while keeping lethal injection as the default execution method. The law also requires prison officials to find another method of execution used by another state if lethal injection is unavailable or if a state court declares it unconstitutional. That could pave the way for using firing squads since South Carolina has executed two people using that practice. 

The law also speeds up the often complicated appeal process for death penalty cases. Iryna’s Law requires superior courts and the state Supreme Court to review and hold hearings on most appeals within 24 months. Appeals that are currently awaiting hearings that were filed more than 24 months ago must be scheduled for a hearing by December 1, 2026, and have a hearing by December 1, 2027. 

The law, however, does not address more than 100 pending claims filed under the Racial Justice Act, which was signed into law in 2009 and allowed death-row inmates to challenge their sentences based on racial bias. The Republican-led General Assembly repealed the law in 2013, but the state Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that any claims filed before the repeal can be heard in court. 

“You’ve got more than 120 people on death row, and 100 or more of them have challenged their sentences for racial bias in violation of the law,” said Matthew Robinson, a political science professor at Appalachian State University and author of a 2021 report on the state’s death penalty. “And until those challenges are heard by courts and ruled upon, then none of those people are going to be executed by the state of North Carolina.” 

Long Pause

In the last two years, six states have restarted the death penalty after executions were paused for several years—Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah. 

If North Carolina resumes executions, it would be the one with the longest pause at 19 years, said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit in Washington, D.C. 

Maher said those six states paused executions for a variety of reasons, including the inability to acquire lethal injection drugs or investigations into execution protocols. North Carolina executions stopped in 2007 when the N.C. Medical Board prohibited doctors from any involvement beyond observing, which led to legal challenges. In 2009, the state Supreme Court ruled against the medical board, but by then, litigation over the Racial Justice Act had begun. 

North Carolina was once one of the top death penalty states in the country, Robinson told The Assembly. Between 1977 and 2006, North Carolina sentenced 436 people to death and carried out 43 executions. 

But in recent years, the number of death sentences handed out has dramatically decreased. In six of the last 14 years, North Carolina has had zero death sentences. At the peak, in 1995, North Carolina sent 34 people to death row. Last year, prosecutors across the state tried three capital murder cases. Juries in all three recommended life sentences. That reflects a national trend of both fewer executions and death sentences, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 

Politically, either restarting or repealing the death penalty had been a nonstarter. Former state Rep. Jon Hardister tried to get his fellow Republicans to repeal the death penalty in 2015, to no avail. That same year, state legislators passed the Restoring Proper Justice Act to remove barriers to restarting the death penalty, including removing requirements that only a licensed physician could oversee executions and sealing information from the public about drugs used in legal injections. But executions didn’t resume. 

In 2023, four Democrats filed a bill to repeal the death penalty, but it never got a vote. On the opposite end, Republicans filed House Bill 270 this spring that would have allowed executions by electric chair and firing squads. It didn’t come up for a vote. 

Iryna Zarutska’s brutal death on August 22, however, gave Republicans sufficient political ammunition for a new effort to restart the death penalty. Senate leader Phil Berger made that clear at a news conference on September 11. 

“For far too long, there’s been a judicially imposed moratorium on the death penalty by activist judges and doctors and attorneys general and governors who are more interested in serving leftist political bosses than justice for victims and their families and justice for the public as well,” he said, according to WRAL. 

But the road to new executions will likely be rocky, experts say. 

Shelagh Kenney, interim executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a Durham-based nonprofit law firm that represents capital defendants, said it’s hard to figure out exactly how many death-row inmates would be immediately eligible for executions. There are currently 122 death-row inmates, and the majority of them have pending post-conviction appeals in state and federal courts, she said. 

And inmates who have exhausted all of their state and federal post-conviction appeals still have claims under the Racial Justice Act that have yet to be heard, Kenney said. 

Berger could not be immediately reached for comment, but on September 19, he sent N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson a letter, asking for a status report on all 122 death-row inmates. He noted that the longest-serving death-row inmate is Wayne Laws, a Davidson County man convicted in 1985 for killing two men with a claw hammer. 

“While I recognize some of these inmates may have unresolved claims under the now-repealed Racial Justice Act, pending appeals, or other ongoing legal challenges, the public deserves a clear explanation for the prolonged suspension in executing the sentences imposed by our courts,” Berger said in the letter. “Over the past two decades, North Carolina’s death row population has remained largely stagnant—declining not through executions, but primarily through natural deaths, and most controversially, through Gov. Roy Cooper’s commutation of the sentences of 15 convicted murderers.” 

Eric Wilson, the chief of staff for the attorney general’s office, responded that two court orders, one in 2014 and another in 2019, prevent the state secretary of public safety from scheduling executions until legal battles over the Racial Justice Act and lethal injection protocols are resolved.

Wilson included a report on the status of appeals for all 122 death-row inmates. All of them, except for one, have a pending direct appeal, post-conviction appeal, or claim under the Racial Justice Act. The inmate who has no pending claims can’t be executed now because of the two court orders Wilson mentioned.

Noel Nickle, executive director of the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she worries that rushing through the appeals process will result in more wrongful convictions. She pointed out that 12 people on death row in North Carolina have been exonerated. 

“Of the 12 people who have been exonerated from death row, we’re talking more than 100 years combined of when they were on the [death row],” she said. “Henry McCollum was on the row for 30 years. So literally, if [Iryna’s Law] had been law at the time, those men would be dead now, and they would be dead innocent men.” 

Kenney said North Carolina doesn’t have enough criminal defense attorneys and public defenders to handle a shortened appeal process, meaning that many cases won’t get the proper review needed to determine constitutional violations and possible wrongful convictions. 

“Capital litigation, at the trial stage, at the appellate stage, and at the post-conviction stage, is incredibly complex,” Kenney said. “And it’s due to the complexity of those cases that they haven’t moved at the pace Republicans seem to want.”