Hasson Bacote was charged with murder when he was 21 years old and sentenced to death in 2009.
Fifteen years later, lawyers are arguing on his behalf that racial bias led to his death sentence. If successful, he'll be taken off death row and sentenced to life in prison instead.
Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons could reach a decision in Bacote's case as soon as Wednesday or later this month, according to the defense team.
The case could have implications for more than 100 other death row prisoners with pending claims under the North Carolina Racial Justice Act.
"This is going to be a significant decision, and it would have persuasive authority for other judges, we would hope," said Gretchen Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. "I would think that this would be something that Governor Cooper would take notice of."
Closing arguments ended Wednesday afternoon at the Johnston County courthouse in Smithfield.
"What this evidence will show is that Black citizens throughout the state of North Carolina are excluded from jury service at levels that are twice that of their white neighbors," said Henderson Hill, a senior counsel for the ACLU, at the hearing Wednesday.
Defense lawyers argue that there was "no mercy" for Bacote, now 38. He faced a mostly white jury, white prosecutors, a white judge, and a jury in which Black people were kept out due to alleged instances of racial bias. The hearings began in February.
His legal team says some of those examples include the use of racist epithets and tropes to justify the exclusion of Black jurors, and racist language used by prosecutors.
The defense has argued that Bacote grew up impoverished and disenfranchised, surrounded by violence as a youth before he was charged with murder in the drug-related shooting of 18-year-old Anthony Surles.
Part of their argument is Johnston County's record of sentencing capital defendants: six out of six Black men with a capital sentencing hearing received a death sentence. In contrast, about half of 11 white men in those hearings got life sentences, according to Engel.
"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,'" said Henderson Hill, senior counsel for the ACLU, in a statement. "The racism in North Carolina's application of the death penalty is so clear it's blinding."
The role of the Racial Justice Act
Under the Racial Justice Act enacted in 2009, capital defendants could be re-sentenced to life if their defense proves there was racial bias in their case.
Four other defendants in North Carolina had their cases heard in 2012 and were re-sentenced to life. The law was repealed by the General Assembly in 2013 — but the state court ruled in 2020 that claims brought under the Racial Justice Act are still valid.
"It's the cases on the margins where discrimination can have the biggest effect," Engel said. "I think Mr. Bacote's case is just a paradigmatic example of that. It's a weak case. It's not premeditated. He (was) young. There was lots of mitigation."
Bacote's legal team includes the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.
They point out the disproportionate rate at which the case's prosecutor struck Black people from the jury compared with white people.
In an analysis of more than 170 capital cases in the state, Black people were more likely to be removed during jury selection processes than white people at a two-to-one ratio, according to Durham attorney Jay Ferguson, who testified in court Wednesday.
Prosecutors have struck Black jurors in North Carolina before due to reasons like NAACP membership, connections to historically black colleges, and living in majority-Black neighborhoods, while claiming such reasons were 'race-neutral,' according to the ACLU.
