Lake a 'lifelong Republican'? No

The Observer’s David Ingram called my attention to a story Wednesday in the Washington Post about the involvement of former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr. in the case of Lee Wayne Hunt, who has spent a couple decades in prison for murder. He was convicted partly on the basis of a discredited process linking him to the bullets used in the murder.
Lake’s involvement was interesting because he’s a Republican who stirred up a little controversy when he created a study that lead to the Innocence Inquiry Commission. I wrote a Tuesday blog item about that.
On Wednesday the Post reported:
“Lake, a lifelong Republican, also was instrumental in the creation last year of North Carolina’s Innocence Commission, which reviews cases of convicts who say they are innocent.”
Well, no. It is probably accurate to call Lake a lifelong conservative, but he has been a Republican less than half his life. He was a Democratic state senator when I came to Raleigh in the late 1970s, though he soon became a Republican to run, unsuccessfully, against Gov. Jim Hunt in 1980.
Of course, I’ve made this kind of error myself, so I shouldn’t be too critical of the Post. In a blog the other day about Lake’s involvement, I called Gerda Stein a lawyer. She wrote back: “I am not a lawyer, I’m a social worker at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. (used to be a mitigation investigator, now public information person). But my parents, especially my father the lawyer, will be proud!”