Despite odds, death sought in UNC student slaying

HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. -- Prosecutors know they face long odds when trying to persuade jurors to recommend executing the sole defendant eligible for capital punishment in the killing of University of North Carolina's student body president.

But for a crime that led thousands to gather for one memorial service after another for Eve Carson, they're willing to try twice, both in state and federal court.

"Based on what we know, the state feels there are aggravating factors that exist (to seek the death penalty)," Orange County District Attorney Jim Woodall told a judge in August, seeking and gaining permission to move ahead with a capital case.

However, in the past century, just two people convicted in Orange County have been put to death, the last coming more than 60 years ago. The last time a jury sent a defendant to death row was in 1973, with the sentence eventually overturned.

"It would be highly unusual," Gerda Stein, an attorney at the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation, said of Woodall's chances. "It's just not the culture of the county. ... Had (he) committed the Orange County crime over the line in Durham, it might be a different story."

Demario Atwater, 22, and Laurence Lovette, 17, are charged in Orange County with first-degree murder and other counts, including armed robbery and kidnapping in Carson's death. Lovette is not eligible for execution since he was a juvenile at the time of her killing on March 5.

On Monday, a federal grand jury also indicted Atwater in the crime. Experts say the stacking of charges is a new tactic used to lower the odds against a person being found guilty and not receiving a death sentence.

In federal court, the Department of Justice has yet to approve the request of U.S. Attorney Anna Mills Wagoner to seek execution. Even if she gets it, the odds of a jury condemning the defendant don't get any better in federal court, said David Bruck, director of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, a capital trial resource center at Washington & Lee Law School in Lexington, Va.

"(Going through the federal court system) is never a fast track to death row," he said. "It is slow, cumbersome, expensive and rarely successful."

The 22-year-old Carson from Athens, Ga., was taken from her Chapel Hill home and watched helplessly as hundreds of dollars were withdrawn from her bank account at several ATMs. She was later shot five times in the middle of a residential street, including once in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun, as she tried to shield herself from the gunfire.

Authorities have said Atwater and Lovette, each with an extensive criminal history and on probation, were out looking for someone to rob when they spotted Carson through a front window at her Chapel Hill home.

The circumstances of her slaying suggest it should come as no surprise that prosecutors are trying to win a death sentence, said Michael Radelet, the chair of the sociology department at the University of Colorado who has studied the death penalty for about 30 years.

Carson, who was white, was a prestigious Morehead-Cain scholar at North Carolina, a pre-med student who was majoring in political science and biology. She taught science at an area elementary school, and studied and volunteered abroad.

Both Atwater and Lovette are black high-school dropouts arrested repeatedly on a variety of crimes in the weeks leading up to her death. Lovette is also facing a state murder charge in the slaying of Duke University graduate student Abhijit Mahato.

"Status can be measured by income, education, race, whether they're insiders or outsiders of a community. The lower social status makes it more likely," said Radelet, who opposes capital punishment. "Had this been the other way around -- where a student body president kills an unemployed person of lower status in the community -- it would not be a death penalty case."

Even if Woodall or federal prosecutors are able to secure a death sentence, it's clear that Atwater would have many years ahead of him on death row.

The Justice Department has authorized 441 cases for a possible death sentence since 1988. Only three federal defendants have been executed, the last in 2003, while another 56 people wait on death row.

North Carolina has had an unofficial moratorium on executions since early 2007, resulting from a confusing legal morass created by the struggle of several courts to address the state's use of lethal injection.

"It's clear that North Carolina juries are not easily giving out the death penalty," said Richard Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The money has been spent getting life sentences."

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