If you thought the death penalty debate was getting a little stale – that it seemed less like Dead Man Walking and more like the grainy filmstrips on the Judicial Branch we watched in high school civics – the latest developments may come as a mild surprise.

Over the summer, several North Carolina cities passed moratoriums on the death penalty, after an epidemic of wrongful convictions urged them to reconsider the practice. Meanwhile, the folks at Raleigh’s Central Prison are putting the death chamber on the same high rotation that Torquemada gave the stake, scheduling three executions for the next month and a half.

Unless the governor grants clemency for the first time in his tenure, one of these short-order executions will go down later this week. Friday morning, Harvey Lee Green will emerge from a cramped holding cell, shuffle past the witness room, and mount a gurney where an automated syringe will explode potassium chloride into his vein with all the impassiveness of a slaughterhouse worker braining a bull. Green is the first black man in North Carolina to face execution since 1961, and, according to many opponents of capital punishment, another example of the penalty’s arbitrary race bias.

North Carolina has bucked the odds of executing a black person since lynch mobs still roamed the South; even so, the death row population is a whopping 60% minority. According to a recent report by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a prisoner is also 4.4 times more likely to join this elite group of prisoners if convicted of murdering a Caucasian. Across the nation, about 82% of the capital cases involve the homicide of White people, although most murder victims are either Black or Hispanic.

Even if this racism isn’t reason enough to reconsider this punishment, the death penalty also disproportionately targets the poor, who lack the financial backing to launch an OJ-style defense. By the ACLU’s estimation, 90% of death row couldn’t afford an attorney at time of trial and relied on a grab bag of public defenders who were better suited to challenge speeding tickets than capital cases.

In Green’s case, the sentence was, likewise, tainted with racism. During his jury selection, the prosecutor removed 83% of the prospective black jurors and pulled only one of the white candidates from the pool. According to local defense attorneys, this dodgy practice is widespread at the DA’s office, which allegedly has an unapologetic tendency to “remove black prospective jurors because they were black.”

Beyond these disturbing generalities about race, the damning particulars of Green’s case would have mitigated a capital sentence in most murder trials. His crime was not premeditated. Initially conceived as a robbery, it lapsed into a violent struggle only after the heist was complete. Green also copped a guilty plea before he was a suspect in the killing. And if that weren’t enough, the prosecution refuses to disclose the files it kept on Green’s case, despite a state law mandating their release in death penalty trials. Armed with the prosecutor’s pre-trial notes, Green’s defense could unearth any misconduct that might have occurred during jury selection.

Green admitted his culpability in the crime he committed, but the history of capital punishment is also peppered with many wrongful conviction claims. Since the turn of the century, 350 capital cases have involved innocent people, and many of them received vindication only after the execution took place.

Although Miranda and other landmark decisions have given defendants a fighting chance at trial, murder convictions are often extracted from the innocent, especially when an over-zealous prosecutor embroiders the truth to pad his chances of winning. For instance, a prisoner named Charles Munsey was bumped from North Carolina’s row when a superior court judge unraveled that the prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence during his trial. Munsey died in prison before he received another day in court.

Prompted by a slue of wrongful convictions that included Munsey’s imprisonment, the city of Carborro recently passed one of the aforementioned moratoriums on capital punishment. In Chapel Hill, a similar resolution followed the Carborro measure, while a third is still in the pipelines over in Durham. Other moratoriums, including a resolution by the state of Nebraska, are surfacing throughout the nation.

But even with the passage of these precedent-setting resolutions, the US still lags behind most of the West in delivering the KO to capital punishment. Most European countries have either abolished the death penalty altogether, or else they have reserved it for extreme cases like war crimes. The United States is one of five nations grossing the majority of the world’s executions, and the rest of these boast two-figure GNPs and tinpot dictators who never seem to outgrow their military fatigues.