The F’d Up Finale 

Recap 

Written by Brandi Abbott

On F’d Up this season we’ve learned a lot about how broken the criminal justice system is and how fucked up the NC SBI Crime Lab has been. There has been some reform based on everything that has come to light, but there is still a long way to go. 

After Alan Gell’s case in 2004, the governor signed a bill that required DAs to provide all of their files from their cases to defense attorneys if they ask for them. The attorney general at the time, Roy Cooper, made changes to the SBI Crime Lab. He installed an ombudsman to address concerns relating to the crime lab or its employees. Documents and ASCLD-LAB reports were posted for transparency, but none of the results or repercussions from internal investigations seem to have been made public. The governor at the time, Pat McCrory, moved the SBI Crime Lab from under the purview of the attorney general at the time, Roy Cooper, to the department of justice so that it was under the purview of the governor and the name was changed from the NC SBI Crime Lab to the NC State Crime Lab. 

In 2016, Roy Cooper ran for governor and narrowly beat Pat McCrory, which put the crime lab back under his control. Right after the audit report was released, the governor at that time, Bev Perdue, signed a bill making it a crime for lab workers to withhold results. 

The North Carolina SBI Blood Stain Pattern Analysis unit was suspended during the audit. To this day it has still not been reopened and analysis of bloodstain patterns is outsourced.

When Priya and Jess went into detail about the history and missions of the crime lab in NC, they didn’t mention that all of the information was from the current crime lab’s website. According to their site they and other forensic labs across the nation are now subject to the ISO/ISE 17025 accreditation standard. ANAB is authorized to perform this accreditation but no one can confirm whether or not they’re the one’s doing the accreditation for the NC State Crime Lab. One would hope not given that ANAB merged with ASCLD LAB who spent years accrediting the SBI Crime lab while it was full of misconduct. Priya checked out some public documents on the state crime lab’s site and found an update on the preservation of biological evidence. They now preserve evidence in capital cases until the convicted person is executed or dies and if a convicted person receives a life sentence, the evidence is preserved until they die. But if a person pleads guilty in a crime – evidence is only preserved for three years! Three years doesn’t seem like very long given how often coercion of confessions occur. 

Priya says that she’s visited the site often over the course of doing research for this podcast, and that recently a lot of information that used to be easy to access like policies, accreditation reports and the like are not as easy to obtain. Policies can only be accessed if you sign in with a Microsoft account and you have to email the lab to get accreditation reports. 

Another reform is the forensic advisory board that is now in place and includes forensic scientists from a couple of different states, however, they could benefit from a commission like the one Marvin Schechter is on in New York that includes more people who are involved in the justice system or are impacted by forensic science, like defense attorneys. 

Their website includes the minutes from their board meetings up until a year ago, but if they’re still meeting, they don’t seem to update the site any longer. The new director of the lab, Vanessa Martinucci, does have a forensic background which is a big deal considering their past employees. She has a Masters in biology and was a supervisor at the Houston Forensic Science Center. 

People Priya and Jess have talked to who were or are affected by the lab has said a lot of this hasn’t helped to fix the huge systemic issues that have happened. Instead, it seems as though they’re making changes to distract from their issues. 

People had been trying to enact change in North Carolina even before Greg Taylor’s exoneration. Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake had been noticing problematic issues in NC cases, the same kind Chris Mumma was noticing when she was clerking for him. Because of these concerns, in 2002 Chief Justice Lake established the Criminal Justice Study Commission, the purpose of which was to review police and prosecution procedures for factors that helped lead to wrongful convictions. This commission helped to birth the Innocence Inquiry Commission - which ultimately led to Greg Taylor’s exoneration. In very sad news, Chief Justice died last month, but he leaves a legacy of trying to make the world a better place. 

Chief Justice Lake, along with Darryl Hunt and others, helped in getting the Racial Justice Act enacted in 2009. As you may recall from an earlier episode, the Racial Justice Act allowed death row inmates and those still on trial to challenge their sentence if they thought it had been negatively impacted by their race. They also discussed that in December of 2012, three defendants who had been on death row had their cases reheard because of this act and their lives were saved. F’d Up covered three cases on the past episode but there was actually six. As you may remember from that episode, the three that were discussed had their sentences reduced to life in prison and this was only possible because they filed their grievances prior to 2013 when then governor Pat McCrory signed a repeal of the Racial Justice Act. This repeal affected all of the cases. 

One of these cases was Tilmon Golphin, a black man, was pursued by the police through the woods where they eventually caught him. A perspective juror who was black overheard two white jurors say that Tillman never should have made it out of the woods. The black juror brought this up and the prosecutor questioned him about it. He was struck from the jury but the two white people were not. Overall, five of the seven qualified black people were removed from the jury. Tilmon was ultimately sentenced by a jury of 11 white people and one black person. This was in Johnston county which had billboards boasting that it was “KKK country” up until the 80s. 

Another case was Rayford Burke who was black and was sentenced to death by an all white jury. The prosecutor drew attention to Rayford’s size and race in a negative fashion and called him a “big black bull” during a plea for the jury to find him guilty. 

Quintel Augustine is also black. In his case, the prosecutor wrote handwritten notes about each perspective juror. For a perspective white juror who admitted to drinking, they wrote “drinks, country boy, okay” but described a perspective black juror who admitted to drinking as a black wino. For a black female juror they made the note that she was from a “respectable black family” but made no such note for any of the white jurors about their potential “respectable” families. 

In the case of Marcus Robinson there was a perspective juror who was black and a high school graduate. The prosecutor asked this juror if he repeated grades or had trouble reading, but never asked any of the prospective white jurors the same question. This prosecutor admitted he was not particularly racially fair. 

Christina Walter’s trial involved the prosecutor asking prospective jurors if they ever felt they had been burgled. Two white perspective jurors who had had some minor property crimes and felt it wasn’t a big deal ended up on the jury, whereas a black prospective juror was struck when they said they didn’t feel like a victim over their car being broken into and a radio stolen. Out of 14 qualified black jurors, 10 ended up being struck.

Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, said that one of the things that was so remarkable about the Racial Justice Act was that before when one suspected prosecutors were acting discriminatory, there was no opportunity to question them. With the RJA they had to testify about and answer to their actions. As of August of 2019, the RJA is back on the table. The state Supreme Court heard all six cases that fell under the RJA. A couple of choices were on the table. Do the four defendants try and get back life without parole or do they try and get new hearings since it’s already been proven that there was racial bias in their cases. 

According to the NCCADP, for the other two cases the court will decide whether people on death row who filed claims under the RJA will get their chance to present their evidence in court even after the repeal. They went on to say that three of the six defendants were sentenced to death under an all white jury. The NCCADP breaks down a study done in Michigan that was covered in the death row episode to say that qualified black jurors were struck from capital juries at twice the rate as white jurors. Even when other factors are brought in, the disparity can only be attributed to race. Defendants found direct evidence of discrimination such as prosecutors’ notes of potential jurors where the notes included descriptions such as “blk wino” and “thug”. 

Cassandra Stubbs is the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project and represents one of the defendants, Marcus Robinson. She spoke with a reporter at the Real News Network and said that even though the NC Supreme Court didn’t re-sentence them to death and did not enter a new order about their life sentences, after they remanded, all four prisoners were moved from the prisons around the state where they had been serving their life without parole sentences. Without any reason at all, these four defendants were moved back to death row. If the court rules in the defendants favor, they can get new hearings and present significant evidence that race played a factor in their sentencing. The RJA attorneys sai