The Outlaws of 1970

This month a superior court judge in Fayetteville, N.C., put his pen to an order declaring that three prisoners who had escaped from the Cumberland county jail were outlaws. Outlaws? In 1970? As it happens, North Carolina is one of a handful of states where outlawry remains in existence. Once a man is made an outlaw by court order in North Carolina, he is literally outside the protection of the law. Any citizen may try to capture him and, if the outlaw resists, the citizen may legally kill him on the spot.

Bobby Deaver, a Fayetteville lawyer who has written on the history of outlawry in the North Carolina Law Review, argues that the statute should be rescinded before "irreparable injustice occurs which could reflect on the dignity of the laws of North Carolina." The very concept of outlawry--though it is technically a legal procedure--recalls the dismal frontier days of vigilantes and lynch mobs, when angry citizens were allowed to take the law into their own hands and too frequently did. Fortunately for the three North Carolina prisoners, all were peaceably recaptured within three days of the judge's ruling.

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