Black N.C. Man Sent To Death Row In Known KKK Town Alleges Racial Bias; To Have Landmark Hearing

RALEIGH – North Carolina’s 75 Black death row inmates could potentially see their sentences changed to life in prison in the wake of a landmark hearing scheduled to begin next week that will test whether racial discrimination has played a role in jury selection in capital cases.

The lead case focuses on Hasson Bacote, a Black man in Johnston County who was sentenced to death in 2009 by 10 white and two Black jurors for his role in a felony murder. Bacote, now 37, has been held in a Raleigh prison as death sentences in North Carolina remain on hold, in part due to legal disputes and difficulties obtaining lethal injection drugs.

Bacote was found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of Anthony Surles during an attempted home robbery in Johnston County. He’s been on death row since 2009 — the same year legislators passed the Racial Justice Act, which allowed death row inmates to appeal for a new sentence if they could show racial bias was a factor in their cases.

In 2013, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, repealed the law, arguing that it “created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice.”

But the state Supreme Court in 2020 ruled in favor of many of the inmates, allowing those like Bacote who had already filed challenges in their cases to move ahead.

At the time, nearly every person on death row, including both Black and white prisoners, filed for reviews under the Racial Justice Act, according to The Associated Press.

Now, Bacote’s legal team, which includes lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, is gearing up for a trial court hearing to begin Monday (Feb. 26) in Johnston County. It could last two weeks.

Given the county’s history, the ACLU is going to have a field day documenting the racism that festered in this region.

Lawyers plan to call several historians, social scientists, and others to establish a history and pattern of discrimination used in jury selection in Bacote’s trial and in Johnston County, a majority-white suburban county of Raleigh that once prominently displayed Ku Klux Klan billboards during the Jim Crow era.

In court filings, Bacote’s lawyers suggested that local prosecutors at the time of his trial were “nearly two times more likely to exclude people of color from jury service than to exclude whites.” In Bacote’s case, prosecutors chose to strike prospective Black jurors from the jury pool at more than three times the rate of prospective white jurors.

Bacote’s legal team also said its evidence will show that in Johnston County, the death penalty was 1½ times more likely to be sought and imposed on a Black defendant and two times more likely “in cases with minority defendants.”

If Bacote wins this case, he will be offered life in prison instead of being subject to execution by lethal injection. 

Meanwhile, the office of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein is attempting to delay the upcoming hearing, arguing in a court filing that the claims made by Bacote’s lawyers are based, in part, on a Michigan State University study that the North Carolina Supreme Court had already found last year to be “unreliable and fatally flawed.”

While the state attorney general’s office said in its court filing that racial bias in jury selection is “abhorrent,” according to WRAL, the office added that a “claim of racial discrimination cannot be presumed based on the mere assertion of a defendant; it must be proved.”

Stein, a Democrat running for North Carolina governor in November, has taken heat from a primary challenger who questioned his office’s stance in trying to halt the upcoming hearing.

“It’s shameful that my primary opponent AG Stein is trying to keep a convicted Black defendant from getting his long-awaited day in court before early voting begins,” Michael Morgan, a former state Supreme Court justice, wrote on X.

It’s shameful that my primary opponent AG Stein is trying to keep a Convicted Black defendant from getting his long-awaited day in court before early voting begins because Stein doesn’t want Black voters to know his (Stein’s) argument in this high-profile case which is that the…

— Michael Morgan (@MorganForGov) February 19, 2024

“There’s no question that our evidence in Hasson Bacote’s case goes to this broader conversation that’s happening in North Carolina over whether we should keep the death penalty or if the governor should commute the row,” Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said.

In deciding whether Bacote’s death sentence should be changed to life in prison, the judge could rule from the bench or make his decision at a later time, Stubbs said, adding that it could set a precedent.

“Is there discrimination statewide in jury selection in North Carolina?” she asked. “That’s the question at stake; that’s the question that the judge will be answering.”

The article is compiled from NBC News, WRAL,  NC Newsline, and The Root.

Image credits:

Feature image courtesy of ACLU

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