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DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA - SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2019
If HB 370 Become Law Black
Sheriffs Fear Removal From Office
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Now that both Houses of the North Carolina General Assembly have passed controversial House Bill 370 - the
measure requiring North Carolina sheriffs to cooperate with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials
in detaining alleged illegal immigrants suspected of crimes, before the measure gets to Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk, the
state House has to concur with state Senate changes made Monday night.
Cooper has already indicated that he’s not on board with the bill, calling it “unconstitutional” in a statement issued
before its senate passage Monday.
“As the former top law enforcement officer in our state, I know that current law allows us to lock up and prosecute
dangerous criminals regardless of immigration status,” Cooper said in a statement. “This bill isn’t about that — in
addition to being unconstitutional, it’s about scoring political points and using fear to divide us.”
The Democratic governor is expected to veto the measure, and now that he has more Democrats in the House, it’s
not likely that body will be able to override his veto with a two-thirds count, even though Republicans still have a
majority there.
It would take a super-majority to defeat Cooper’s veto, and while that’s not likely to happen, suppose enough House
Republicans were able to convince a handful of Democrats to vote to override, suggesting that with an election year
just around the corner, their vote against HB 370 could be used against them.
If that happened, the measure would become law, most likely to be challenged in court as unconstitutional, which
could effectively freeze it while in litigation.
But after all of that, if HB 370 ultimately survived its challenges, the first of the six black sheriffs who won election
in last year’s November midterms could find him or herself legally challenged to keep their job.
Those black sheriffs - representing Wake, Mecklenburg, Durham and three other counties - won election by
promising not to work with ICE agents in detaining suspected illegal immigrants. And all three from those counties
— Sheriff Gerald Baker of Wake, Garry McFadden of Mecklenburg and Clarence Birkhead of Durham, have each
maintained their campaign promises not to capitulate to ICE demands.
But they say that has made them targets of Republican lawmakers’ ire, who have threatened to have them and any
North Carolina sheriff removed from office if they don’t cooperate with ICE.
“House Bill 370 is not about protecting our communities. It’s not about making our communities safe. House Bill
370 is clearly about attacking a select group of sheriffs,” Sheriff McFadden said a press conference last week, even
after the NC Sheriffs Association did an about face and supported the bill.
HB 370 spells it out: “Any sheriff or police officer shall be removed from office by the judge of the superior
court, resident in or holding the courts of the district where said officer is resident upon charges made in writing, and
hearing thereunder, for willful failure... or refusal to perform the duties of his or her office.”
According to the ACLU of North Carolina, this is the first time in a hundred years that the provision for removing
a sheriff in the state has been modified.
Essentially, if five citizens in a county file a complaint with the local district attorney against the sheriff, that
complaint is investigated, and then heard in court for a judge to decide whether the sheriff should be removed.
Earlier on Monday, the NCNAACP, along with representatives from various Latino organizations and the Poor
People’s Campaign, held a press conference at the Legislature calling HB370 “racist” not just against the Latino
community, but the black sheriffs too.
TELEPHONE 919-682-2913
PRICE 50 CENTS
Sheriff Clarence Birkhead
Booker campaign gets
2020jolt with pushback
against Biden
By Elana Schor and Meg Kinnard
WASHINGTON (AP) - Cory Booker’s supporters have spent
months waiting for a moment when the charismatic senator could
break through a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates.
That opening came when Joe Biden clumsily talked about segrega
tionists, prompting Booker to push back at his 2020 rival to great
effect.
The New Jersey senator called on Biden to apologize June 20 af
ter the former vice president nostalgically referenced the “civility”
he maintained during his time in the Senate with two segregationist
Democrats in the 1970s despite their vast distance in ideology. After
Biden pushed back, saying Booker should apologize to him because
the senator “knows better,” Booker called for the Democratic Party
to choose a presidential nominee who can be “sensitive” to the “hurt
and pain” caused by Biden noting that the two senators had called
him “son” instead of “boy,” a reference to the racist way many whites
addressed black men at the time.
Court tosses black man’s murder
conviction over racial bias
By Mark Sherman
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court on june 21 threw out the murder conviction and death sentence for a black man
in Mississippi because of a prosecutor’s efforts to keep African Americans off the jury. The defendant already has been tried six
times and now could face a seventh trial.
The removal of black prospective jurors deprived inmate Curtis Flowers of a fair trial, the court said in a 7-2 decision written
by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The long record of Flowers’ trials stretching back more than 20 years shows District Attorney Doug Evans’ “relentless, deter
mined effort to rid the jury of black individuals,” with the goal of an all-white jury, Kavanaugh wrote.
In Flowers sixth trial, the jury was made up of 11 whites and one African American. Prosecutor Evans struck five black pro
spective jurors.
In the earlier trials, three convictions were tossed out, including one when the prosecutor improperly excluded African Ameri
cans from the jury. In the second trial, the judge chided Evans for striking a juror based on race. Two other trials ended when
jurors couldn’t reach unanimous verdicts.
“The numbers speak loudly,” Kavanaugh said in. a summary of his opinion that he read in the courtroom, noting that Evans
had removed 41 of the 42 prospective black jurors over the six trials. “We cannot ignore that history.”
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas called Kavanaugh’s opinion “manifestly incorrect” and wrote that Flowers “presented no
evidence whatsoever of purposeful race discrimination.” Justice Neil Gorsuch joined most of Thomas’ opinion.
Thomas, the only African American on the court, said the decision may have one redeeming quality: “The state is perfectly
free to convict Curtis Flowers again.”
Flowers has been in jail more than 22 years, since his arrest after four people were found shot to death in a furniture store in
Winona, Mississippi, in July 1996.
Flowers was arrested several months later, described by prosecutors as a disgruntled former employee who sought revenge
against the store s owner because she fired him and withheld most of his pay to cover the cost of merchandise he damaged.
Nearly $300 was found missing after the killings.
Defense lawyers have argued that witness statements and physical evidence against Flowers are too weak to convict him. A
jailhouse informant who claimed Flowers had confessed to him recanted in recorded telephone conversations with American
Public Media s In the Dark podcast. A separate appeal is pending in state court questioning Flowers’ actual guilt, citing in part
evidence that reporters for “In the Dark” detailed.
"A seventh trial would be unprecedented, and completely unwarranted given both the flimsiness of the evidence against him
and the long trail of misconduct that has kept him wrongfully incarcerated all these years. We hope that the state of Mississippi
will finally disavow Doug Evans’ misconduct, decline to pursue yet another trial and set Mr. Flowers free,” Sheri Lynn Johnson,
who represented Flowers at the Supreme Court, said in an emailed statement.
Evans did not respond to email requests for comment and no one answered the phone in his office june 21.
In the course of selecting a jury, lawyers can excuse a juror merely because of a suspicion that a particular person would vote
against their client. Those are called peremptory strikes, and they have been the focus of the complaints about discrimination.
The Supreme Court tried to stamp out discrimination in the composition of juries in Batson v. Kentucky in 1986. The court
ruled then that jurors couldn t be excused from service because of their race and set up a system by which trial judges could
evaluate claims of discrimination and the race-neutral explanations by prosecutors.
Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights attorney, was part of the Batson case majority,
but he said the only way to end discrimination in jury selection was to eliminate peremptory strikes.
Flowers case has been to the high court before. In 2016, the justices ordered Mississippi’s top court to re-examine racial
bias issues in Flowers case following a high court ruling in favor of a Georgia inmate because of a racially discriminatory jury.
But the Mississippi justices divided 5-4 in upholding the verdict against Flowers. The state, defending the conviction, said the
justices must narrow the focus from Evans’ broader record to the case at hand.
But Kavanaugh said that even on the narrower basis, there is evidence that at least one prospective black juror for the sixth
trial, Carolyn Wright, was similarly situated to white jurors and was improperly excused by Evans.
The trial court clearly erred in ruling that the state’s peremptory strike of Wright was not motivated in substantial part by
discriminatory intent,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Biden called Booker on June 22 about the matter, but tension be
tween the two Democrats continued into JUNE 25. During the call,
“Cory shared directly what he said publicly,” Booker spokeswoman
Sabrina Singh said in a statement. “Cory believes that Vice President
Biden should take responsibility for what he said and apologize to
those who were hurt.”
Booker clarified Thursday night (JUNE 25) on MSNBC that he
doesn’t want Biden to apologize to him directly, but “to the American
people, and having this discussion with all of us.”
The schism between the two candidates, who at times offer a
similar emphasis on collaboration with the GOP despite mounting
polarization under President Donald Trump, promises to reverberate
this weekend in a pivotal early voting state. They are the final two
hopefuls set to speak to the South Carolina Democratic Party during
its 21-candidate convention on June 25.
Booker, 50, has languished in the middle tier of candidates in the
early months of the race, but some strategists looked to his confi
dence in taking on Biden, 76, as the beginning of a potential boost.
“Cory’s argument is very poignant, and it is 'Why should we be
spending time teaching any nominee’ - but let’s focus on Joe Biden
- 'what it means to be conscious about race?’” said Quentin James,
co-founder of Collective PAC, which boosts African American can
didates in federal and statewide offices.
Booker’s campaign message “has been about love” and unity,
James added. “That’s fine. But we also want to see a little fight from
Cory.”
For Booker and his advisers, however, a willingness to engage in
meaningful fights always has been on the agenda. One person close
to Booker’s campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity to dis
cuss internal dynamics, said June 23 that Biden crossed a line with
his lack of an apology for recalling that the Senate “got things done”
even with white supremacists, making this week’s battle an easy one
to pick.
Whether the tension continues in South Carolina this weekend re
mains to be seen. Booker has maintained one of the sprawling Demo
cratic field’s largest footprints in South Carolina, home of the first
Southern primary and the first state in which candidates can make
their cases before an audience of mostly black primary voters.
Even so, Biden has maintained a foothold in South Carolina that
could prove stronger than his lead in national polls, thanks to his
appeal to older black voters who connect with him as former Presi
dent Barack Obama’s No. 2. That both men are selling themselves as
bridge builders with a more optimistic message could further com
plicate Booker’s path to translating his pushback to an advantage
over Biden.
“Biden is sort of co-opting his theme,” Audrey Haynes, a politi
cal scientist at the University of Georgia, said in a recent interview.
“Biden has always been a 'bring it together’ kind of guy, so he has
more money, was VP to a popular black president, and they had a
visible bromance that seemed very authentic.”
Biden’s public stumble over addressing his past relationships with
segregationist senators offers a road map for Booker to continue to
talk about thorny discussions of race as he works to undercut the
white former vice president’s claim to be the most electable Demo
crat against Trump. Still, Booker isn’t the only black candidate who
will get that opportunity this weekend: California Sen. Kamala Har
ris is also scheduled to speak in South Carolina.
Jalen Elrod, first Democratic Party vice chairman in Greenville
County, said in a recent interview before joining Sen. Bernie Sand
ers’ presidential campaign that Booker may be lagging in support
because of Harris’ hard-charging presence and appeal among black
women.
As the race moves past next week’s debates, said Elrod, “you’ll
get a better sense of where the black community is.”