Judge to rule whether racial bias tainted jury selection in Black man’s death row case

A North Carolina judge is expected to rule Friday on whether a Black defendant’s capital trial was undermined by allegations of racial bias during jury selection, potentially opening the door to death row inmates throughout the state getting resentenced.

The decision follows a landmark hearing last year brought by Hasson Bacote, a Black man who was sentenced to death in 2009 by 10 white and two Black jurors for his role in a felony murder.

Bacote’s is the lead case to test the scope of the Racial Justice Act of 2009, a groundbreaking state law that allows condemned inmates to seek resentencing if they can show racial bias played a role in their cases.

Bacote, 38, had been seeking to have his death sentence changed to life in prison as a result of the judge’s ruling. But that happened on Dec. 31, when outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the death sentences of 15 inmates, including Bacote’s, to life in prison without parole.

While Cooper insisted that “no single factor was determinative in the decision on any one case,” among the factors considered were the “potential influence of race, such as the race of the defendant and victim, composition of the jury pool and the final jury.”

Cooper’s act of clemency for Bacote provides a reprieve from death row. Still, Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr.’s decision Friday could have a far-reaching affect on many of the other 122 inmates facing the death chamber.

If Sermons agrees that Bacote’s request for resentencing is warranted, legal experts contend that would set a precedent for the other death row inmates seeking relief under the Racial Justice Act.

When it was first signed into law, nearly every person on death row, including both Black and white prisoners, filed for reviews, according to The Associated Press. The law was later repealed in 2013 by then-Gov. Pat McCrory, who believed it created a “loophole to avoid the death penalty,” but those who initially filed challenges could still pursue their litigation.

Bacote was charged with murder along with two others in the 2007 fatal shooting of Anthony Surles, 18, during a home robbery attempt when Bacote was 20. The other two defendants in the case were convicted on lesser charges and later released from prison.

During a hearing before Sermons last year, Bacote’s lawyers said a history and pattern of racial discrimination in picking juries in Johnston County, southeast of Raleigh, compromised his capital case and others. They argued that local prosecutors at the time of Bacote’s trial were nearly two times more likely to exclude people of color from jury service than to exclude whites, and 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.

Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, which is also helping to represent Bacote, said at the hearing that a prosecutor during closing arguments at Bacote’s trial referred to him as a “thug, coldhearted and without remorse.”

Such language “taps into this false narrative of the super predator myth,” Burrell said.

While Bacote’s lawyers called on several historians, social scientists, statisticians and others to establish a case of racial bias on a systemic level, state prosecutors questioned the stats used by Bacote’s legal team and how some of their experts could not testify specifically to his case.

If the test under the Racial Justice Act is “whether racism has existed in our state, then there is no need for a hearing in this case or any other case. But that’s not the question before this court,” state Department of Justice Attorney Jonathan Babb told the judge last year. “Rather, the question is whether this death sentence in this case was solely obtained on the basis of race. The defendant has not shown that his sentence was solely obtained on the basis of race.”

Then-state Attorney General Josh Stein had led the charge to fight Bacote’s case. Stein has since won election as governor, replacing Cooper, a fellow Democrat, who was term-limited.

North Carolina has not executed anyone since 2006, in part due to legal disputes and difficulties obtaining lethal injection drugs.

Stein has expressed support for the death penalty while ensuring capital cases are free from racial discrimination. Neither his office nor the office of Attorney General Jeff Jackson immediately responded to requests for comment ahead of Friday’s ruling.