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Our View: McCrory should set politics aside, appoint Lamb DA
The Daily Advance
Saturday, October 5, 2013

Gov. Pat McCrory will soon get a second chance to do something he already should have done: appoint Assistant District Attorney Nancy Lamb the 1st Prosecutorial District’s permanent district attorney, allowing her to complete the remaining year of the four-year term started by her former boss and longtime colleague, the late Frank Parrish.

McCrory had the chance to take this commonsense step over a week ago, in the immediate aftermath of Parrish’s death of heart-related failure. Instead, he only named Lamb interim district attorney — an appointment lasting only 60 days.

Lamb is clearly qualified for the permanent appointment. Besides working alongside Parrish for 29 years, she had been his chief assistant district attorney for the past two years, responsible for the administration of the office. So there can be only one possible explanation for McCrory’s reluctance to appoint her: partisan politics.

It seems some area Republicans, many of whom know little or nothing about the workings of the criminal justice system, have decided to oppose Lamb’s appointment on the sole basis that she’s not a registered Republican. They believe McCrory, the state’s first GOP governor in 20 years, has been presented a golden opportunity with Parrish’s death to appoint a fellow Republican to the vacant district attorney’s job, believing it will give that Republican a leg up in next year’s election, when Parrish’s term expires and any number of candidates could seek the office. They believe McCrory will be squandering that opportunity if he appoints Lamb, who like her late boss, is a registered Democrat.

While this kind of political maneuvering happens all the time — Democratic governors have appointed Democrats to fill vacancies created by the deaths of Republican officials — we think it would be wrong in this case for McCrory to heed area Republicans’ demand. Yes, the district attorney is a political officeholder subject to a partisan process — candidates are required to state a party affiliation and run in that party’s political primary. But district attorney is not a political officeholder in the same way county commissioners, state lawmakers or even governors are. Nearly every decision one of those officeholders makes is a political decision. No decision by a district attorney, on the other hand, should ever be based on politics. Facts, what the law says and what the interests of justice are, are the only legitimate bases for a district attorney’s decisions. The only “political” part of the job are the elections district attorneys are required to run in as candidates every four years.

That’s why McCrory’s appointment of someone other than Lamb would be so damaging. Given that no one else in the 1st District has her prosecutorial experience, appointing someone else would clearly be seen as political. The individual appointed would have no standing with either the district attorney’s staff, the legal community or the public as anything other than “the governor’s man” or the “governor’s woman,” beholden to interests other than the pursuit of justice. It doesn’t matter how hard the person appointed works to establish their own credibility, ultimately they will be viewed in this compromising way.

Appointing Lamb avoids this stigma because she’s already in charge of the office, pursuing the same priorities as the district attorney to whom the voters have entrusted the office, first in 1994 and most recently in 2010: Frank Parrish. If the voters disagree with those priorities, they can make a change in the office in the 2014 election when Parrish’s final term ends.

Appointing Lamb to fill the vacancy also makes practical sense. Think about it: Anyone besides Lamb appointed to the district attorney’s job will have, at most, only two months to begin the process of getting up to speed on the office’s operations. After then, they will have to start concentrating on the 2014 election and running for a four-year term.

Given that the filing period for the party primaries opens in January, and the primaries are held in May, someone new to the office almost certainly will be spending a lot of time away from it, trying to raise money and build support across the seven counties of the 1st Prosecutorial District. What will happen to the proper functioning of the district attorney’s office in the meantime? Who will be in charge? Who will be accountable?

Lamb, who is seeking the appointment to complete Parrish’s term, hasn’t said whether she’ll file for a four-year term next year. Regardless of what she ultimately decides, having her fill the seat through the end of next year would avoid the problem of appointing someone who would be juggling competing priorities — trying to learn the office while simultaneously running for election.

Those pushing for McCrory to appoint a Republican apparently are hoping a vote on recommendations to the governor by the 1st Judicial District Bar in Currituck on Monday will present McCrory with at least one viable GOP option for the district attorney vacancy. Given Lamb’s long experience in the District Attorney’s Office and work with the practicing attorneys who make up the bar, she’s not likely to lose Monday’s vote. However, since McCrory isn’t bound by the vote outcome, he could appoint an attorney whose name appeared on the ballot and only got one vote — just because that attorney is a Republican. For the sake of retaining a justice system free of the taint of politics, we hope that doesn’t happen. McCrory should do what’s right: He should appoint Lamb to complete the remainder of Frank Parrish’s term.

Text of Gov. Perdue’s statement on Wilmington 10 pardons

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Dec. 31, 2012

Text of Gov. Bev Perdue’s statement on her decision to issue pardons of innocence to the Wilmington 10, as reported by WECT Wilmington.

I have spent a great deal of time over the past seven months reviewing the pardon of innocence requests of the persons collectively known as the Wilmington Ten. This topic evokes strong opinions from many North Carolinians as it hearkens back to a very difficult time in our state’s past, a period of racial tensions and violence that represents a dark chapter in North Carolina’s history. These cases generate a great deal of emotion from people who lived through these traumatic events.

“Outgoing Governor Bev Perdue signed a Pardon of Innocence for the Wilmington 10 Monday.”

wect.com

“Outgoing Governor Bev Perdue signed a Pardon of Innocence for the Wilmington 10 Monday.”

In evaluating these petitions for clemency, it is important to separate fact from rumor and innuendo. I have decided to grant these pardons because the more facts I have learned about the Wilmington Ten, the more appalled I have become about the manner in which their convictions were obtained.

In 1980, a federal appeals court overturned the convictions in a written decision that highlighted the gross improprieties that occurred during the trial. The federal court determined as a matter of law that numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct and other constitutional violations took place. Among other things, the court ruled that with regard to the testimony of the prosecution’s key witness – upon whose credibility the case depended entirely – “the conclusion is inescapable that (he) perjured himself” and that “this fact was bound to be known to the prosecutor . . .” The court also declared that it was undisputed that key documents had repeatedly been withheld from defense lawyers. It also found numerous errors by the trial judge that had the effect of unconstitutionally prejudicing the defendants’ ability to receive a fair trial.

Since the trial ended, the prosecution’s key witness and two supporting witnesses all independently recanted their testimony incriminating the defendants. Furthermore, last month, new evidence was made available to me in the form of handwritten notes from the prosecutor who picked the jury at trial. These notes show with disturbing clarity the dominant role that racism played in jury selection. The notes reveal that certain white jurors believed to be Ku Klux Klan members were described by the prosecutor as “good” and that at least one African American juror was noted to be an “Uncle Tom type.”

This conduct is disgraceful. It is utterly incompatible with basic notions of fairness and with every ideal that North Carolina holds dear. The legitimacy of our criminal justice system hinges on it operating in a fair and equitable manner with justice being dispensed based on innocence or guilt – not based on race or other forms of prejudice. That did not happen here. Instead, these convictions were tainted by naked racism and represent an ugly stain on North Carolina’s criminal justice system that cannot be allowed to stand any longer.

Justice demands that this stain finally be removed. The process in which this case was tried was fundamentally flawed. Therefore, as Governor, I am issuing these pardons of innocence to right this longstanding wrong.

Web version of WECT’s reporting is here. A PDF of the web page is here.