North Carolina death row inmates may be eligible for resentencing after Hasson Bacote’s victory last week.
Death row inmates across North Carolina may be eligible for resentencing after a judge ruled last week that a Black defendant’s capital trial was compromised by the presence of an almost all-white jury.
This potential outcome, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, which assisted in Bacote’s case, could set a precedent for future legal battles.
“What we saw in Mr. Bacote’s case is that the more we look for evidence of discrimination in our state’s capital jury selection system, the more we find,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said. “This ruling creates a path to justice for the hundred-plus individuals who have filed claims and whose cases were similarly tainted with bias.”
Outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper commuted Bacote’s death sentence, as well as 15 others, to life in prison without the possibility of parole on December 31. While Cooper emphasized that “no single factor was decisive in the decision for any case,” he acknowledged that considerations such as the “potential influence of race— including the race of the defendant and victim, the composition of the jury pool, and the final jury”—played a role.
Bacote’s lawyers argued during a hearing before Sermons last year that a history of racial discrimination in jury selection in Johnston County, southeast of Raleigh, had tainted his case and others. Local prosecutors during Bacote’s trial were accused of being nearly twice as likely to exclude people of color from the jury pool compared to white jurors. In Bacote’s case, prosecutors removed prospective Black jurors at more than three times the rate of white jurors, his lawyers argued.
“When my death sentence was commuted by Gov. Cooper, I felt enormous relief that the burden of the death penalty—and all of the stress and anxiety that go with it—were lifted off my shoulders,” Bacote said after the ruling. “I am grateful to the court for having the courage to recognize that racial bias affected my case and so many others.”
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Source: Black Enterprise
