The Superior Court in Johnston County, North Carolina, ruled today that racial discrimination was a “significant factor” in capital cases, including that of Hasson Bacote, who challenged his death sentence under the state’s Racial Justice Act.
In a 120-page order, Superior Court Judge Wayland J. Sermons Jr. found that prosecutors deliberately struck Black jurors from jury service in Mr. Bacote’s case at more than three times the rate of white jurors.
The judge also cited as evidence of illegal racial bias the prosecutor’s use of “thinly veiled racist terms” like “thug,” “piece of trash,” and “predators of the African plain” to refer to Black defendants.
Evidence of racial discrimination presented during a two-week-long hearing last year, the court wrote, “points to a consistent picture of the role race has played in jury selection throughout Johnston County and Prosecutorial District 11, and in the capital cases tried by prosecutor Mr. [Greg] Butler, including in Mr. Bacote’s trial.”
In addition to finding racial bias in prosecutors’ decisions to strike Black people from juries, the court found that race was a significant factor in those juries imposing the death penalty. Indeed, “death sentences were imposed significantly more frequently on Black defendants in Johnston County” at the time of Mr. Bacote’s trial, the court concluded.
Emphasizing that, as U.S. Supreme Court precedent makes clear, racial bias creates systemic injury to the entire judicial system, the court wrote:
There can be no doubt racially discriminatory jury selection practices “undermine public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice.” Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 87 (1986). A death sentence tainted by race likewise harms defendants and impugns the legitimacy of the criminal punishment system as a whole.
The findings extend beyond the case of Hasson Bacote, his lawyers told the News & Observer. Mr. Bacote’s death sentence was among 15 commuted by then-North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper at the end of last year.
“I am grateful to the court for having the courage to recognize that racial bias affected my case and so many others,” Mr. Bacote said in a statement. “I remain hopeful that the fight for truth and justice will not stop here.”
“RJA Is The Remedy”
Enacted in 2009, North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act required courts to vacate a death sentence if race was a factor in the imposition of the death penalty.
Evidence presented in the first two hearings under the new law revealed that racial discrimination in jury selection had remained “a significant problem that will not be corrected without a conscious and overt commitment to change.” The Cumberland County Superior Court found that prosecutors had struck Black jurors at two to three times the rate of non-Black jurors. In 2012, the court granted RJA relief and removed four claimants from death row.
In the face of overwhelming evidence that racial bias had infected death penalty cases in North Carolina, the state legislature repealed the RJA in 2013, made the repeal retroactive, and reinstated the four successful RJA claimants’ death sentences.
But in 2020, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the more than 100 death-sentenced North Carolinians who filed claims under the RJA prior to the repeal were entitled to hearings and upheld the previous grants of relief.
Mr. Bacote’s case was the first to move forward since that ruling and, like in the first cases, the superior court granted RJA relief based on compelling and extensive evidence of racial bias in capital sentencings county-wide.
“The evidence that race drives jury selection and jury sentencing decisions in capital cases is repugnant and cries out for a remedy,” the court wrote. “The RJA is that remedy.”