25 Years After McCleskey, Looking Forward to Legislative Fixes of Supreme Court Error
On the federal level, since the McCleskey decision, members of Congress have proposed numerous laws – 15 so far – addressing racial justice in the federal capital punishment system. As part of the omnibus crime bill passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1994, Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) proposed an amendment called the Racial Justice Act, after which the North Carolina law is modeled, to be included in the legislation as a congressional response to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey. The Justice Integrity Act, introduced in 2009, sought to address racial and ethnic disparities across the criminal justice system by proposing pilot programs in 10 jurisdictions that would include collection of data concerning investigations and prosecutions and recommendations for reform. Those reforms didn't pass, but Friday's ruling in North Carolina reminds us that the nation can no longer ignore the fact of racial bias in the death penalty system, and that lawmakers must do more to fix it.
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