Defense attorneys used a sweeping study of capital cases in North Carolina done by Michigan State University law school researchers to bolster their claims. The jury that sent Robinson to death row included nine white jurors, one American Indian and two blacks, according to court filings. Nearly a dozen members of Tornblom's family left the courtroom without commenting. Race played a "persistent, pervasive and distorting role" in jury selection and couldn't be explained other than that "prosecutors have intentionally discriminated" against Robinson and other capital defendants statewide, Weeks said. Study co-author and Michigan State professor Barbara O'Brien told a North Carolina legislative panel last month the review of more than 7,400 potential capital jurors couldn't find anything other than race to explain why potential black jurors were rejected by prosecutors more than twice as often as whites. Union County prosecutor Jonathan Perry, who helped the Cumberland County District Attorney's Office argue the case against Robinson, said the study was untrustworthy because it was based on a too-limited sample of death penalty cases to provide meaningful results. Only Kentucky has a law like North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, which says the prisoner's sentence is reduced to life in prison without parole if the claim is successful. A condemned killer's trial was so tainted by the racially influenced decisions of prosecutors that he should be removed from death row and serve a life sentence, a judge ruled Friday in a precedent-setting North Carolina decision. Robinson defense attorney James Ferguson of Charlotte told Weeks, who decided the case without a jury, that the study showed race was a significant factor in almost every one of North Carolina's prosecutorial districts as prosecutors decided to challenge and eliminate black jurors. Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks' decision in the case of Marcus Robinson comes in the first test of a 2009 state law that allows death row prisoners and capital murder defendants to challenge their sentences or prosecutors' decisions with statistics and other evidence beyond documents or witness testimony. Robinson's mother, Shirley Burns, said she would advocate for the law, which a new Republican majority in the state's General Assembly is trying to eliminate.
– A black inmate in North Carolina came off death row today thanks to a controversial new law in the state. A judge reduced the sentence of Marcus Reymond Robinson to life without parole after ruling that prosecutors purposely sought to keep blacks off his jury, reports the News & Observer of Raleigh. The landmark ruling is the first under the state's Racial Justice Act, and about 150 other death row inmates in the state have cases pending, notes AP. Among other things, the law allows the judge to take statistical patterns on race into account. In this case, Robinson's legal team showed that prosecutors rejected about 50% of potential black jurors and only 15% of non-black jurors. The jury ended up with only two black people. That disparity is enough "to support an inference of intentional discrimination," wrote the judge, according to the New York Times. Robinson was convicted of murdering a white teenager in 1994.