Racial Justice Act re-sentencing hearing concludes

COURT EXHIBIT FOR HASSON BACOTE

A billboard that welcomed people to Smithfield, a town in Johnston County, stood until the 1970s, “but the efforts to keep Black Johnstonians off juries continued,” said Henderson Hill, one of the attorneys for Hasson Bacote, a Black man sentenced to death in Johnston County in 2009.

Arguments have ended in a Johnston County judicial proceeding that will have significant implications for about 120 people on North Carolina’s death row.

For two weeks, attorneys for Hasson Bacote, a Black man sentenced to death in Johnston County in 2009, have put the death penalty on trial. They built their case around 680,000 documents turned over in discovery, which an attorney called “the most comprehensive discovery provided by the state on jury selection issues in North Carolina.”

They questioned Assistant District Attorney Gregory Butler, who prosecuted Bacote, about his closing arguments in two cases where he called Black defendants “thugs” and “predators on the African plain.” And they presented evidence showing that Black prospective jurors were more than 2.5 times more likely to be struck from a jury pool statewide, four times more likely to be struck from a jury pool in Johnston County and 10 times more likely to be struck in cases tried by Butler.

“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,’” said Henderson Hill of Charlotte, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The racism in North Carolina’s application of the death penalty is so clear it’s blinding.”

Bacote’s is the lead case testing the Racial Justice Act, a landmark state law that was in effect from 2009 to 2013 and that gives people sentenced to death an opportunity to be resentenced to life in prison without parole if they can prove racial discrimination played a role in their case. That means how Bacote’s case is handled will set the stage for how other judges deal with the other roughly 120 pending Racial Justice Act claims.

Superior Court Judge Wayland J. Sermons, Jr. has not yet issued a ruling. In the coming weeks, after the attorneys receive certified transcripts of the arguments, Sermons will require lawyers for the state and Bacote’s legal team to submit, in writing, the case for why their side is right. Then they will return to the Johnston County courthouse for closing arguments, likely at least six weeks away.

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