Bias in the Box: For capital juries across America, race still plays a role in who gets to serve

John Nelson is one of many African Americans in North Carolina whose exclusion from capital-jury service was arguably due to racial bias. “I felt like I could do justice,” says Nelson. “I would have looked at everything.”

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On December 16, 2007, Jennifer Vincek was pulling another overnight shift at the Shell Food Mart in downtown Statesville, North Carolina, when Jeffrey Peck, a regular at the store, stopped in for coffee and the morning paper. As usual, Vincek was alone, so she and Peck sat together and talked through the final flickers of night. She had three young children at home. Peck had five young grand-kids. With Christmas just a week away and an unusual weather pattern sweeping across the East Coast, it isn’t difficult to imagine what they might have discussed. Eventually a customer wearing a green parka walked in, a nineteen-year-old named Andrew Ramseur. The store’s surveillance camera picked him up as he walked straight to the bathroom, and then again thirty seconds later as he made his way toward the front of the store. By then Vincek had returned to the counter. She pointed him toward the bread display, where he picked up a loaf and placed it between them at the register.

The gun appeared when Vincek started to ring him up. She fell to her knees when he pointed it at her face. Ramseur reached over and took cash from the register, then shot Vincek. Peck, apparently trying to distract Ramseur, pushed a phone card display to the floor. Ramseur turned and shot Peck in the chest, then went back to Vincek and pumped another bullet into her body, then grabbed more cash from the register. As Ramseur left the store, he passed another man walking in, but said nothing as he made his way to a white minivan, got in, and drove away. He was in police custody by the time the surveillance footage aired on the local news.

The murders marked the bottom of a downward spiral for Ramseur. The year before, he was arrested for breaking and entering. The felony was reduced to a misdemeanor, but to his family it signaled the severity of his drug problem. Ramseur’s father was forced to put him out of the house because of his substance abuse. His older brother, Shon, who was enrolled at Appalachian State University, took Andrew in, and for a while it seemed as if things might work out: Andrew found a job at a pizza shop and was, according to a friend, “trying to get straight.” But then, homesick, he made his way back to Statesville, where he bounced around for a while before falling back into his pattern of drinking, drug abuse, and criminal activity. First he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon; the charge was dismissed. Then came the murders of Vincek and Peck.

The killings sent a chill through Statesville. Within days of Ramseur’s arrest, the Statesville Record & Landmark reported that prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty. Following his indictment, Ramseur entered a plea of not guilty. His attorneys, brothers Mark and Vince Rabil, started preparing a diminished-capacity defense, based in part on the fact that, a few months before the shooting, Ramseur had been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, following a binge that included a serious fall and a consequent traumatic brain injury. There was no way to prove that he hadn’t taken two lives; rather, the defense hoped to convince the jury that Ramseur was guilty of not first- but second-degree murder, or even manslaughter. This would secure a life sentence without parole instead of the death penalty. Their plan was to argue that the combination of head trauma, PCP use, and other mitigating factors had significantly reduced Ramseur’s culpability. Given the circumstances and the footage, they knew the odds were against them.

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