Judge declares in opinion that ‘Prejudice is not a quantifiable commodity’
By David Donovan
BridgeTower Media Newswires
RALEIGH, NC — The North Carolina Supreme Court has unanimously reinstated the conviction of a white man convicted of murdering a black man in Raleigh, saying that while a portion of a prosecutor’s closing argument that discussed the defendant’s alleged animus towards African-Americans may have been improper, it wasn’t so prejudicial as to require that the conviction be set aside.
Chad Copley shot and killed Kourey Thomas in 2016. The night of the shooting, Thomas and some friends, also black men, had been congregated around some cars that were parked in front of Copley’s house. The group hadn’t been loud or disruptive but nevertheless their presence angered Copley, who called 911 and was recorded saying “I’m going to kill him.” At trial Copley admitted to having falsely reported there were “hoodlums racing up and down the street,” and saying he was “locked and loaded” and going to “secure the neighborhood.”
Copley shot Thomas as Thomas was cutting across a small portion of Copley’s yard while running back to a friend’s car. Copley was charged with first-degree murder. He claimed that the shooting was in self-defense, even though Thomas had been unarmed and non-threatening, and had no interaction with Copley before the shooting, and Copley had fired his gun while holed up in his own garage.
During closing argument the prosecutor, Patrick Latour, invited jurors to consider the “undercurrent” of Copley’s defense and the “elephant in the room,” which was ostensibly that Copley was scared of Thomas and his friends simply because they were black men.
“Ask yourself if Kourey Thomas and these people outside were a bunch of young, white males walking around wearing N.C. State hats, is he laying dead bleeding in that yard?” Latour asked jurors. “A fear based out of hatred or a fear based out of race is not a reasonable fear, I would submit to you. That’s just hatred. And I’m not saying that’s what it is here, but you can consider that. And if that’s what you think it was, then maybe it’s not a reasonable fear.”
Wake Court Superior Court Judge Michael J. O’Foghludha overruled Copley’s objections to that line of argument. Last year a divided panel of the Court of Appeals overturned the conviction, finding that the objections should have been sustained. The state appealed, and on April 3 Justice Robin Hudson, writing for the court, reversed and remanded the Court of Appeals’ decision.
In her opinion Hudson assumed, without deciding, that the comments about race were improper, but ruled that Copley had failed to show that he’d actually been prejudiced by them, or that the jury would have likely reached a different decision if they’d been excluded. The Court of Appeals’ majority had found Latour’s comments to be more offensive than ones that the Supreme Court had found to be prejudicial in the past, but Hudson noted that its ruling had relied on a case that had dealt with comments made during the sentencing phase of a death penalty case, not during trial.
“Prejudice is not a quantifiable commodity; statements cannot be assigned a number on a scale from which we can determine whether one statement here is more or less prejudicial than one in another case,” Hudson wrote. “Rather, the purpose of a prejudice analysis is to determine whether there is a reasonable possibility that the jury would have acquitted defendant had his objection to the State’s argument been sustained. It is defendant’s burden to show this.”
Hudson wrote that, given all of the “compelling evidence of [Copley’s] guilt” presented by prosecutors, Copley had failed to provide a persuasive argument that there was a reasonable possibility the jury would have acquitted him in the absence of the comments about race.
Justice Anita Earls wrote a concurring opinion to say that she would have also explicitly ruled that Latour’s comments had been proper under the circumstances.
Marilyn G. Ozer of Massengale & Ozer in Chapel Hill represented Copley on appeal. Ozer declined to comment on the court’s decision, noting that the case is still before the Court of Appeals on remand to consider other issues.
