RALEIGH, N.C. — A Raleigh man and nearly 100 others sentenced to death in North Carolina are hoping to get their sentences overturned as part of the state’s repealed Racial Justice Act.
A hearing was held Monday for 37-year-old Hassan Bacote, a Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Johnston County by a majority-white jury in 2009.
The hearings began last week with Bacote’s legal team claiming a pattern of discrimination in jury selection in Johnston County and across North Carolina.
Expert historians Samuel Sommers from Tufts University and Crystal Sanders, a professor at Emory University and a Johnston County native, both testified about how there can be racial discrimination in the legal system — even if it’s subtle.
Bacote is looking to get off death row through the Racial Justice Act, a law passed in 2009 then revoked in 2013. It allowed those on death row to challenge their sentence if race played a significant role in the judgment.
Executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation Gretchen Engel says the RJA was about dealing with covert discrimination.
“That sort of subtle, it’s under the radar,” Engel said.
In 2020, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that all lawsuits brought under the RJA before its repeal could still move forward.
“My hope is that people understand the truth is being revealed, and that they not look away,” Engel said.
Samuel Sommers took the stand to explain how racial bias can have an impact on decision-making in schools, the workplace and the criminal justice system.
Defense attorney Ken Rose says these expert testimonies are vital in hearings like this because studies show racial discrimination does happen.
“Those studies all converged to suggest that prosecutors do, in fact, use race, sometimes not consciously, sometimes unconsciously, to exclude African American jurors,” Rose said.
Jatrissa Wooten
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