A New Addition to the School of Government's Indigent Defense Manual Series

Emily Coward and I are glad to share a new resource with you: a reference manual entitled Raising Issues of Race in North Carolina Criminal Cases. If you are a person who likes to have a hard copy on the shelf, you can buy it here. Like our other manuals, it is available for free online at http://defendermanuals.sog.unc.edu. (The electronic platform has been retooled, and I think you will find that it has a nice look and is user-friendly.) We created this manual to assist North Carolina court actors in recognizing and addressing issues of race that may arise in criminal cases. By gathering, organizing, and analyzing the law on the intersection of race and the criminal justice system, the manual aims to help defenders in particular to identify and raise meritorious claims of racial bias in non-capital cases. To our knowledge, this is the first such reference manual of its kind. Hopefully, court actors in other states will find that North Carolina has provided a model they can use to create a similar resource. At the outset, the manual describes key concepts such as implicit bias and racial disparities. Subsequent chapters review key stages of a criminal proceeding and discuss how issues of race may arise at a particular stage and responses court actors may take. Topics include stops, searches, and arrests; eyewitness identification procedures; pretrial release; selective prosecution; the composition of grand and trial juries; references to race at trial; and sentencing.  Here is a brief summary of what the [...]