Judge finds racial bias tainted jury selection in Black man’s death row case

By Erik Ortiz, NCB

A North Carolina judge ruled Friday that a Black defendant’s capital trial was undermined by allegations of racial bias during jury selection, potentially opening the door to death row inmates throughout the state getting resentenced.

The decision follows a landmark hearing last year brought by 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’s is the lead case to test the scope of the Racial Justice Act of 2009, a groundbreaking state law that allows condemned inmates to seek resentencing if they can show racial bias played a role in their cases.

Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr. found Bacote did prove discrimination in his case, a ruling that is expected to have a far-reaching effect on many of the other 122 inmates facing the death chamber by paving the way for them to successfully challenge their sentences, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped to represent Bacote.

“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 in a statement. “This ruling creates a path to justice for the hundred plus individuals who have filed claims and whose cases were similarly tainted with bias.”

Bacote, 38, had been seeking to have his death sentence changed to life in prison as a result of the judge’s ruling. But that happened on Dec. 31, when outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the death sentences of 15 inmates, including Bacote’s, to life in prison without parole.

While Cooper insisted that “no single factor was determinative in the decision on any one case,” among the factors considered were the “potential influence of race, such as the race of the defendant and victim, composition of the jury pool and the final jury.”

Cooper’s act of clemency for Bacote provides a reprieve from death row.

“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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