Black defendant’s attorneys He is protesting the death sentence in 2009 North Carolina’s history of racial discrimination has been documented and acknowledged, he argued Wednesday. implicit bias supports the argument that he should be sentenced to life in prison in jury selection.
If this had happened in the case of Hasson Bacote, who was sentenced to death The sentences of more than 100 others on death row across the state could be similarly commuted for their role in a Johnston County felony by a jury of 10 whites and two blacks.
During closing arguments at Bacote’s trial, white jurors are “shown the box. Black jurors from the same background are shown the door,” said Henderson Hill, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
It is a leading case that tests its scope North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act In 2009, they allowed death row inmates to request a reprieve if they could show they were racially biased.
The landmark law was repealed in 2013 by then-Gov. But in 2020, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of many inmates, allowing those who have already challenged their cases like Bacote to move forward, said Pat McCrory, who believes it creates a “loophole to avoid the death penalty.” .
Attorneys for the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office argued in their closing argument that Bacote’s legal team’s analysis and historical context were irrelevant.
If the test under the Racial Justice Act is “whether there is racism in our country, there’s no need for a hearing in this case or any other case. But that’s not the question before the court,” said Justice Department Attorney Jonathan. Babb said. “The greater question is whether this death sentence in this case was obtained solely on the basis of race. The defendant has not shown that his sentence was obtained solely on the basis of race.”
Now Supreme Court Justice Wayland Sermons Jr. It must weigh whether Bacote’s vexation requirement is satisfied; legal experts said it would set a precedent for other death row inmates seeking relief. Sermons said he would make a decision, but gave no time frame.
When the Racial Justice Act first became law, nearly every person on death row, including black and white inmates, applied for investigations. According to the Associated Press. Currently, there are 136 inmates on death row in North Carolina, 75 of whom are black, 51 are white, and the remaining 10 are of other races. State Department of Adult Correction.
North Carolina has not executed anyone since 2006, in part because of legal disputes and difficulties in obtaining lethal injection drugs.
The state is not the only country where allegations of biased jury selection have led to death penalty cases. In California, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office started again–cases are being considered this year After prosecutors’ evidence that black and Jewish jurors were unfairly excluded from the 1995 trial.
During two weeks of testimony at Bacot’s trial earlier this year, his attorneys called on several historians, social scientists, statisticians and others to identify the history and pattern of discrimination used in both Bacot’s trial and jury selection in Johnston County. that was once a white suburban district of Raleigh prominently displayed Ku Klux Klan billboards During the Jim Crow era. The state also submitted 680,000 pages of discovery, including records related to jury selection in 176 capital cases between 1985 and 2011.
Ashley Burrell, senior counsel for the Legal Defense Fund, which also represents Bacote, explained during closing arguments how statistics show racial disparities in death penalty cases. In Johnston County, Burrell said, of the 17 capital cases tried, all six black defendants were sentenced to death, while in the remaining 11 cases involving white defendants, more than half of those individuals were spared the death penalty.
Burrell said the various statistics weren’t the only evidence available, but also explained how black men have historically been referred to in the courts in derogatory and racist ways to “evoke dangerousness.” In Bacote’s case, she said, during closing arguments in capital court, prosecutors called him “a thug, cold-blooded and remorseless.”
That kind of language “feeds into this false narrative of the super-predator myth,” Burrell said.
Bacote’s attorneys also said that during Bacote’s trial, local prosecutors were nearly twice as likely to exclude people of color from jurors than whites, and that in Bacote’s case, prosecutors chose to strike potential Black jurors from the jury. three times the rate of prospective white jurors.
However, state prosecutors questioned the statistics used by Bacote’s legal team and the failure of some of their experts to testify specifically about his case.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein tried to delay Bacote’s hearing, arguing that the claims by Bacote’s attorneys were based in part on a Michigan State University study already produced by the North Carolina Supreme Court. found last year being “untrustworthy and fatally flawed.”
Although the state Attorney General’s Office said in a lawsuit that racial bias in jury selection was “abhorrent,” according to NBC affiliate WRAL In Raleigh, the office added that “a claim of racial discrimination cannot be presumed based on the defendant’s mere allegation; it must be proven.”
Stein is the Democratic candidate for governor of North Carolina. His office declined to comment because the court proceedings are ongoing.
Amid the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, term-limited Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, faced calls from anti-death penalty advocates to commute the sentences of remaining death row inmates before leaving office.
There is Stein expressed his support for the death sentence while ensuring that capital jobs are free from racial discrimination. His Republican rival, Mark Robinson, said about it public safeeannounced the plan on Wednesday he said he would “reinstate the death penalty for those who kill police and corrections officers.”
“I hope someone in the governor’s office looks into this case and I hope the governor pays attention to this evidence,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Death Penalty Project.
Bacote, 38, is being held in a Raleigh jail on a charge of first-degree murder. He was charged along with two others in the 2007 shooting death of 18-year-old Anthony Surles during an attempted home robbery when Bacote was 20 years old. Two other defendants in the case were convicted of lesser charges and later released from prison.