Racism Tainted Their Trials. Should They Still Be Executed?

Seven years ago, a judge ruled that prosecutors improperly excluded black jurors in the murder trial that put Marcus Robinson on death row.

Now the North Carolina Supreme Court has to decide whether that evidence of racial bias—and similar findings of systemic bias in a handful of related cases—must be taken into account in death penalty appeals.

The hearings stem from the 2013 repeal of the Racial Justice Act, a law that briefly allowed death row inmates to seek life sentences without parole if they could prove that racial bias tainted jury selection in their trials.

After Democrats passed the law in 2009, Robinson and three others won life sentences without parole.

But when pressure from and a led the Republican-controlled legislature to repeal the Racial