The North Carolina General Assembly voted yesterday to override Gov. Bev Perdue's veto of SB 416, a bill that essentially guts the Racial Justice Act (RJA), meaning the destructive bill will become law. The RJA was an historic piece of legislation designed to address the disturbing role that race plays in the death penalty by allowing defendants in capital cases to use statistical evidence to show racial bias in the system. SB 416 cripples the ability of the RJA to address systemic racial discrimination by repealing the provision that allowed defendants to file claims showing statewide discrimination in sentencing and jury selection.
This week, rather than acknowledge a growing mountain of evidence of racial bias in death penalty proceedings, especially in the selection of capital juries, the North Carolina House of Representatives chose to essentially gut the Racial Justice Act (RJA). Senate Bill 416, the so-called “Amend Death Penalty Procedures” makes it so that a judge may not make a finding of racial bias in the system based on statistical proof – as North Carolina Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks did just a few months ago in the first-ever ruling under the RJA.
For the first time in 25 years, the North Carolina. legislature has passed much-needed reform regulating how local school districts use corporal punishment. Back in 1985, the legislature passed a law allowing schools to decide whether or not to use corporal punishment – as opposed to being required to do so. That led to big improvements, and by the start of the 2009-10 school year, 69 districts out of 115 had banned the practice. Yet according to a public records request conducted by Action for Children and the ACLU-NC, kids in North Carolina are still subjected to corporal punishment thousands of times a year - more than 1,400 times during the 2008-2009 school year alone. Unfortunately, legislators have simply protected the system, refusing even to require annual reporting on the use of corporal punishment from school districts.
On June 30, North Carolina Governor Beverly Purdue signed the Healthy Youth Act into law, mandating comprehensive sex ed in public schools for the first time in more than 13 years.
Since 1995, the law required North Carolina public schools to teach abstinence-until-marriage as part of the "healthy living curricula" in grades seven through nine. Concerned about what teens were actually being taught, in 2005-2006, the ACLU of North Carolina and North Carolina NARAL conducted a survey and discovered that at least 25 percent of districts were using curricula featuring medically inaccurate information, gender bias, and discriminatory language towards LGBTQ students.
