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Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former Connecticut governor: NC must confront racism in the death penalty
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. (Photo: Exhibit filed by Bacote's attorneys) As a former prosecutor, mayor, governor of Connecticut, and a member of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty, I have spent much of my career in and around the criminal legal system learning firsthand that our system is far from perfect. Human beings are fallible – and when the stakes of a trial are life or death – it is essential that we examine the process thoroughly for fairness and accuracy. The more I learned, the more I realized that the only way to ensure the death penalty is not unfairly applied and does not cause additional harm to victims was to end it. I went from prosecuting homicide cases in New York to becoming a lead advocate in my state for abolishing capital punishment. Three weeks ago, a North Carolina judge issued a decision in a case brought under the state's Racial Justice Act that examined the impact of race in capital cases. After years of legal wrangling over the scope of the law, Hasson Bacote's case was the first in which Racial Justice Act petitioners were actually afforded the opportunity to present witnesses. Persuaded by extensive evidence of the systemic exclusion of Black jurors and racially disproportionate sentencing outcomes, the court's opinion confirms what many have long known: racial bias infects the administration of the death penalty, including in North Carolina. Nowhere is this disturbing truth clearer than in Johnston County, where Mr. Bacote, the lead petitioner in the Racial Justice Act litigation, was tried and sentenced to death. Since 1990, Johnston County juries returned death verdicts in every case in which Johnston County prosecutors sought death against a Black defendant. Meanwhile, White defendants in the county had a better than 50-50 chance of receiving life sentences. This disparity is not a coincidence. Mr. Bacote's legal team conducted an exhaustive review of approximately 680,000 pages of prosecutors' notes from every capital trial in North Carolina between 1980 and 2010 and found undeniable proof that race plays a central role in determining who gets to sit on juries and who is sentenced to death in death penalty cases. Across Johnston County, prosecutors struck prospective jurors of color at nearly twice the rate of white prospective jurors in all capital cases. One prosecutor's notes disparaged a Black prospective juror with a criminal record as a 'thug' while another prosecutor commented derisively on a juror questionnaire that a Black woman was 'too dumb.' The court appropriately vacated the death sentence imposed in Mr. Bacote's case. But as I said in 2012 when I signed legislation ending the death penalty in Connecticut, pivotal moments like this demand sober reflection, not celebration. The court's recognition of the pattern of racism in sentencing adds to a growing body of evidence showing that racial discrimination is not an anomaly in North Carolina's death penalty system, it is a defining feature. Between 2007 and 2009, three Black men sentenced to death in North Carolina were exonerated after spending more than a decade each on death row, narrowly escaping execution for crimes they did not commit. In 2012, a court resentenced three other people to life in prison because racial discrimination played a key role in securing their sentences. The judge in that case hoped that decision would be the 'first step in creating a system of justice free from the pernicious influence of race' and one that 'truly lives up to our ideal of equal justice under the law.' The continued evidence of racial discrimination in sentencing and jury selection shows that North Carolina has yet to realize this vision. Just last December, then Governor Roy Cooper cited continued concerns about the role of race in sentencing decisions when he announced he was commuting the sentences of 15 people on death row. When the Racial Justice Act was passed in 2009, it intended to address the racial bias baked into capital sentencing. Fifteen years later, North Carolina has yet to ensure that every person facing a capital trial has a fair, unbiased chance at justice. With more than 30 years of proof that racial discrimination infects capital sentencing in North Carolina and more than 120 people still on death row, it is clear more work needs to be done. I urge North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson and Governor Josh Stein to undertake a comprehensive investigation into the use of capital punishment in their state. Failing to act in the face of this undeniable evidence would be a tacit endorsement of a system that has disproportionately condemned Black defendants to death and excluded people in their state from the most important function of jury service. True leaders do not ignore injustice, they confront it head on. So yes, we need sober reflection. But what we need more urgently is action: an investigation, accountability, and a commitment to ensuring that racial bias no longer dictates who lives and who dies in North Carolina.
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
North Carolina judge finds race played role in Black man's death sentencing
On Friday, a North Carolina superior court judge ruled that race played a distinct role in jury selection for Hasson Bacote, a 38-year-old man who spent 15 years on death row before he was pardoned last December. Bacote was sentenced to death in 2009 after a predominantly white jury found him guilty of shooting someone during a robbery. His attorneys noted that there was racial bias in the courtroom, in which the judge and all lawyers were white and prosecutors struck Black jurors at three times the rate of white jurors. Friday's ruling from Judge Wayland J Sermons Jr does not apply statewide, but the decision could upend North Carolina's death penalty sentencing laws. The state has one of the largest death rows in the country, with more than 100 people currently awaiting execution. Along with his attorneys, Bacote filed a lawsuit in 2010 that challenged his sentence, arguing that race played an extreme role in the jury selection not only in his case, but also in all death penalty cases across the state. His attorneys brought the case under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act (RJA), a 2009 law that prohibits seeking or imposing the death penalty because of race. The court found evidence of racist discrimination in Bacote's case, and other cases prosecuted by the North Carolina assistant district attorney Greg Butler. 'I am deeply grateful to my family, my lawyers, the experts, and to everyone who fought for justice – not just in my case, but for so many others,' Bacote said in a statement. 'I want to thank Bryan Stevenson in particular for showing how unfair the jury selection was in my case. When my death sentence was commuted by Governor [Roy] 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. I am grateful to the court for having the courage to recognize that racial bias affected my case and so many others. I remain hopeful that the fight for truth and justice will not stop here.' Last year Bacote's attorneys called on historians, statisticians and other scholars who argued a history of racism in trials in Johnston county. Johnston county, where Bacote was sentenced, has a long record of racism and problematic sentencing for capital defendants. It was the site of at least six lynchings between the Reconstruction era and the first world war; featured KKK billboards that read: 'Welcome to Klan country. Love it or leave it,' through the 1970s; and remains deeply segregated. In Bacote's case, the prosecution removed nearly three times more Black people from the jury than white people, while in the county overall they removed people of color at nearly twice the rate of white people, according to the ACLU. Since 1990, every Black person who faced a capital trial in Johnston county received the death penalty. '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',' Henderson Hill, senior counsel for the ACLU, said in a statement last year. 'The racism in North Carolina's application of the death penalty is so clear it's blinding.' Bacote's lawyers argued that the prosecutors in his 2009 case disproportionately kept Black people from becoming jurors: of over 170 capital cases in North Carolina, Black people were removed at a two-to-one ratio during jury selection. Black people were also prevented from becoming jurors if they were NAACP members, had a connection to an HBCU or lived in majority-Black areas. 'Racial discrimination in our courts and criminal legal system has long impacted death penalty sentencing,' Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement. 'Today's ruling affirms what we have argued all along: racism infects the death penalty. We are hopeful that future decisions will result in relief under the RJA for other North Carolinians currently on death row.'
