Black victim, white killer, rare consequences

On this day in 1995: Fourteen years after being convicted of the rape and murder of a N.C. Wesleyan College cheerleader, Kermit Smith is executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh.

Smith becomes the first white person in North Carolina — and the second in the nation the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 — to be executed for killing a black person.