吃瓜大本营

North Carolina adopted the Racial Justice Act in 2009 because current criminal procedure were not up to the task of eradicating racial bias from capital trials. However, the Racial Justice Act was repealed in 2013, after the ACLU Capital Punishment Project and other civil rights organizations brought the first successful claims under the RJA, securing life sentences on behalf of four people: Marcus Robinson, Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters, and Quintel Augustine.

Seven years later, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that people who had already filed their cases under the RJA, like Mr. Bacote, were entitled to move forward despite the repeal.

Hasson Bacote is a Black man from Johnston County, North Carolina, sentenced to death for his role in a felony murder that occurred when he was 21 years old. Mr. Bacote is one of only eleven individuals鈥攁ll people of color鈥攕entenced to death in North Carolina based on the felony murder doctrine. He is also the only person on North Carolina鈥檚 death row indicted solely under a felony murder theory.

In a hearing that began in late February of 2024, Mr. Bacote put forth an unprecedented amount of evidence pointing to one inescapable conclusion: the race of Black prospective jurors played an impermissible role in jury selection, specifically the prosecutor鈥檚 use of peremptory strikes.

Foundational evidence included statistics, such as the Michigan State University study linked below showing that prosecutors struck Black prospective jurors across the state of North Carolina at more than twice the rate of non-Black prospective jurors. And in Mr. Bacote鈥檚 own case, prosecutors struck Black prospective jurors at more than three times the rate of non-Black prospective jurors.

Expert social science testimony explained this discrepancy, including the role of implicit racial bias and the difficulty of identifying and preventing the operation of such biases in real time. This testimony brought context to some of the many prosecutor jury notes introduced into evidence by Mr. Bacote鈥檚 attorneys. These prosecutor notes featured inappropriate comments about Black prospective jurors, such as the note below commenting that a Black prospective juror 鈥渓ook[ed] like a drug user.鈥�

Historical evidence provided yet another source of insight into this racial discrepancy. In addition to testimony about the discriminatory history underlying peremptory strikes themselves, local historians testified about racial terror against Black North Carolinians going back decades. This included the history of Johnston County itself, which until the late 1970s had billboards like the one below proclaiming the county as 鈥淜lan Country.鈥�

Put together, all of this evidence overwhelmingly showed not only that prosecutors more often struck Black prospective jurors from juries than their non-Black counterparts in North Carolina, but the ways such discrepancies were born in a history carrying lasting effects on culture and decision-making.

Mr. Bacote is represented by the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the Center for Death Penalty Litigation as well as attorney Jay Ferguson.