The recent repeal of the Racial Justice Act has reignited debate over the death penalty. But it also raises questions about the fairness of a second and much broader area of the law, the jury selection process.

Implicit in the Racial Justice Act is that the makeup of juries can be manipulated to skew verdicts, and advocates of the historic law have provided numbers they contend show sweeping patterns of racial disparities.

"The repeal of the RJA gives the prosecutors a green light to continue their discrimination against African-American jurors," said Jay Ferguson, a Durham lawyer representing a death row inmate in Wake County. "The majority in the legislature has now sent a very clear message that racial discrimination is acceptable in our death penalty process."

Beyond potential unfairness to defendants, some lawyers say the process is unfair to those who are arbitrarily blocked from performing an important civic duty. "It also relates to the right that citizens have to serve as jurors regardless of their race," said James Williams, the chief public defender in Orange and Chatham counties.

Prosecutors chafe at such accusations. They say statistics should not be considered in a vacuum, that neither prosecutors nor defense lawyers are seating jurors because of their race.

As Gov. Bev Perdue weighs a possible veto of the legislative action this week that nullifies the 2-year-old law, lawyers across the state say one thing has happened since its adoption: People inside and outside the courtrooms are paying more attention to the racial makeup of juries.

Mark Rabil, a defense attorney who works in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro areas, said he has seen juries in urban capital cases becoming more diverse, but rural areas have not changed as much.

Rabil noted that a 2010 capital case in Winston-Salem as a sign of the change. When Timothy Hartford, who is white, went on trial for what has been dubbed "the Meals on Wheels case," four of the jurors were African-Americans as were three of the alternates. The jury sentenced Hartford to death for killing two white victims.

But in Statesville in Iredell County , Rabil said, a black defendant facing death in 2010 for killing two white victims was tried by an all-white jury. He was sentenced to death.

"Without the RJA, I fear we will revert to the old ways everywhere - all-white or mostly white jurors in the most serious of trials," he said.

A sweeping study of capital cases in North Carolina done by Michigan State University law school researchers showed that qualified black jurors - those who are not released for cause, such as their opposition to the death penalty - were struck by prosecutors at nearly two times the rate as qualified white jurors.

In Wake County, qualified African-American jurors were struck at 2.5 times the rate of all other jurors, and in Cumberland County, they were struck at 2.6 times the rate, according to the Michigan State University researchers.

Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby has insisted since the adoption of the Racial Justice Act that he does not consider a juror's race when deciding who to seat on a capital case. Furthermore, he has argued, no one should assume a juror's race will play into the verdict rendered. "The accusations are that because a jury is all-white, it's somehow racist, and I don't know how you can come to that conclusion," Willoughby has said on more than one occasion.

Scott Holmes, a defense lawyer who practices in several counties, including Durham, Wake and Alamance, says he usually is able to get a diverse jury in Durham County, but outside that courthouse, he often is surprised by how few people of color are in the jury pool.

That, many lawyers say, is a pervasive problem. Bryan Collins, Wake County's chief public defender, said he didn't think prosecutors were intentionally discriminating against one race or another.

"My problem is with the jury pool," Collins said.

Clerks of court across the state pull the names of potential jurors from driver's license lists and voter registrations, but Collins wonders whether such a process inherently excludes those with the lowest incomes from one of the most important duties a citizen has - jury service.

"It's quite often you look out and you see a sea of shining white faces," said Paul Jones, the Forsyth County public defender.

Williams, the chief public defender in Orange and Chatham counties, said, "One thing that needs to be explored is whether there are additional

steps that can and should be taken to make sure our jury panels are more representative of our communities."