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On Friday, a North Carolina superior court judge ruled that race played a distinct role in jury selection for Hasson Bacote, a 38-year-old man who spent 15 years on death row before his sentence was commuted to life in prison last December.
Bacote was sentenced to death in 2009 after a predominantly white jury found him guilty of shooting someone during a robbery. His attorneys noted that there was racial bias in the courtroom, in which the judge and all lawyers were white and prosecutors struck Black jurors at three times the rate of white jurors.
Friday’s ruling from Judge Wayland J Sermons Jr does not apply statewide, but the decision could upend North Carolina’s death penalty sentencing laws. The state has one of the largest death rows in the country, with more than 100 people currently awaiting execution.
Along with his attorneys, Bacote filed a lawsuit in 2010 that challenged his sentence, arguing that race played an extreme role in the jury selection not only in his case, but also in all death penalty cases across the state. His attorneys brought the case under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), a 2009 law that prohibits seeking or imposing the death penalty because of race. The court found evidence of racist discrimination in Bacote’s case, and other cases prosecuted by the North Carolina assistant district attorney Greg Butler.
“I am deeply grateful to my family, my lawyers, the experts, and to everyone who fought for justice – not just in my case, but for so many others,” Bacote said in a statement. “I want to thank Bryan Stevenson in particular for showing how unfair the jury selection was in my case. When my death sentence was commuted by Governor [Roy] Cooper, I felt enormous relief that the burden of the death penalty – and all of the stress and anxiety that go with it – were lifted off my shoulders. I am grateful to the court for having the courage to recognize that racial bias affected my case and so many others. I remain hopeful that the fight for truth and justice will not stop here.”
Last year Bacote’s attorneys called on historians, statisticians and other scholars who argued a history of racism in trials in Johnston county.
Johnston county, where Bacote was sentenced, has a long record of racism and problematic sentencing for capital defendants. It was the site of at least six lynchings between the Reconstruction era and the first world war; featured KKK billboards that read: “Welcome to Klan country. Love it or leave it,” through the 1970s; and remains deeply segregated.
In Bacote’s case, the prosecution removed nearly three times more Black people from the jury than white people, while in the county overall they removed people of color at nearly twice the rate of white people, according to the ACLU. Since 1990, every Black person who faced a capital trial in Johnston county received the death penalty.
“We have white prosecutors standing in front of overwhelmingly white juries comparing Black defendants facing the death penalty to animals – ‘mad dogs’, ‘hyenas’, ‘predators of the African plain’,” Henderson Hill, senior counsel for the ACLU, said in a statement last year. “The racism in North Carolina’s application of the death penalty is so clear it’s blinding.”
Bacote’s lawyers argued that the prosecutors in his 2009 case disproportionately kept Black people from becoming jurors: of more than 170 capital cases in North Carolina, Black people were removed at a two-to-one ratio during jury selection. Black people were also prevented from becoming jurors if they were NAACP members, had a connection to an HBCU or lived in majority-Black areas.
“Racial discrimination in our courts and criminal legal system has long impacted death penalty sentencing,” Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement. “Today’s ruling affirms what we have argued all along: racism infects the death penalty. We are hopeful that future decisions will result in relief under the RJA for other North Carolinians currently on death row.”
• This article was amended on 7 February 2025 to correct that the sentence for Hasson Bacote was commuted to life in prison; he was not pardoned as an earlier version said.