The dark secret of America's death penalty - the blatant and intentional racial bias that infects the system, distorting juries and throwing inordinate numbers of African Americans on to death row - will be laid bare next week in North Carolina. Some of the country's top capital lawyers will gather on Monday at the state supreme court in Raleigh. The court's seven judges will be asked to address a simple question. Will they allow men and women to be condemned to die despite powerful evidence that prosecutors deployed racially discriminatory tactics to put them on death row? At the heart of the case are four inmates facing execution: three African American men and a Native American woman. Over the past seven years Marcus Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters have been on an extraordinary judicial roller coaster that has seen them taken off death row on grounds that their sentences were racially compromised, only to be slapped back on to it following a partisan backlash by the Republican-controlled state legislature. In all four cases, a review of their trials found racial bias had been an overwhelming" feature of how death sentences were secured. In particular, the juries had been "bleached". Black potential jurors were systematically struck off - consciously and intentionally - at a rate far higher than their white equivalents. As a result, juries were produced that were almost exclusively, or in Augustine's case entirely, white.