North Carolina’s more than 135 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 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 sought to challenge his trial’s outcome based on a groundbreaking state law known as the Racial Justice Act of 2009, which allowed death row inmates to seek resentences 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 Pat McCrory, a Republican, repealed the law, arguing that it “created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice.”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, are gearing up for a trial court hearing to begin Monday in Johnston County. It could last two weeks.
“We think the statistical evidence will be powerful and demonstrate the lasting impact of discrimination,” Henderson Hill, senior counsel with the ACLU, told reporters Wednesday.
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…
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