NC leads nation with innocence commission

85% of all executions take place in the U.S. South. This fact makes it all the more significant that, last week, North Carolina took a pioneering move to establish a commission that could exonerate those wrongly convicted of capital crimes. As the Christian Science Monitor reports:

[A]nti-death penalty activists claimed a major victory when North Carolina last week became the first state in the union to establish a government commission that will review evidence and, if warranted, send a recommendation of innocence to a three-judge panel.

The creation of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission fits in with a broader national inquiry into the moral responsibility of legal executions. In North Carolina, it was primarily those who work inside the justice system who helped bring about the commission.

It's an idea with appeal: Lawmakers in at least 12 other states - including Texas, where nearly half of all executions take place each year - are considering filing similar legislation next year, according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

"North Carolina is now the center of gravity in the death penalty debate," says David Elliot of the coalition. "That's significant because the death penalty increasingly is a Southern phenomenon."

As the Monitor notes, it's not surprising NC led the way, after the high-profile exonerations of death row inmate Alan Gell and "lifer" Darryl Hunt in the state. These caused a judicial review committee to find "both large and small mistakes that cast a shadow on the state's justice system," including the fact that 80 percent of freed prisoners were exonerated because of faulty eyewitness accounts.

The question now is whether similar efforts will spill over into other states -- like Texas, which leads the nation in executions, even as new evidence emerges of innocent suspects being put to death.