Johnston County courthouse. Photo: North Carolina Judicial Branch website.
SMITHFIELD — Closing arguments took place Wednesday in a Johnston County court proceeding with significant implications for more than 120 people on North Carolina’s death row.
As NC Newsline reported at length earlier this year , the case involves Hasson Bacote, a Black man who was sentenced to death in Johnston County in 2009.
Bacote and his attorneys are challenging his death sentence under the Racial Justice Act — a North Carolina law enacted in 2009 and repealed in 2013 , that allowed capital defendants to argue that race was the basis for their sentence. The law specified that individuals who successfully showed that race had been a significant factor in the decision to seek or impose the death penalty could be resentenced to life in prison.
Though the 2013 repeal sought to nullify claims filed during the law’s time on the state statute books, a 2020 state Supreme Court ruling invalidated that provision — thus reinstating numerous pending RJA claims, like Bacote’s.
Bacote is one of eight Black men tried capitally in Johnston County since the 1970s. Each of these men received the death penalty, while only about half of white capital defendants received death sentences. He is also one of only 11 people in North Carolina who was sentenced to death without any evidence that he intended or planned the killing. All 11 of these individuals are people of color, and nine are Black.
During several days of testimony in February and March, Bacote’s attorney put on extensive evidence in an effort to show that race was a significant factor in his death sentence. They built their case around 680,000 documents turned over in discovery, which an attorney called “the most comprehensive discovery provided by the state on jury selection issues in North Carolina.”
They also questioned Assistant District Attorney Gregory Butler , who prosecuted Bacote, about his closing arguments in two cases where he called Black defendants “thugs” and “predators on the African plain.” And they presented evidence showing that Black prospective jurors were more than 2.5 times more likely to be struck from a jury pool statewide, four times more likely to be struck from a jury pool in Johnston County and 10 times more likely to be struck in cases tried by Butler.
On Wednesday, Bacote’s lawyers summarized and reiterated their case. “Race is a significant factor in determining death sentences in Johnston County,” said Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.,
“The evidence is very clear that the modern death penalty is still directly tied to our state’s history of racial terror, and that it continues to produce biased outcomes,” Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, wrote in a statement.
In the courtroom on Wednesday, Jonathan P. Babb, special deputy attorney general with the North Carolina Department of Justice, rejected that argument and said Bacote’s sentence was not a byproduct of racial discrimination.
He noted that the racial composition of the jury in Bacote’s case — nine jurors were white, two were Black, and one was Asian — reflected census data for the county at the time in which 76.3 percent of Johnston County’s population was white alone.
The jury selection was “representative of Johnston County,” Babb said.
Bacote’s case is widely viewed as a test case and the ruling is expected to set a precedent for how other judges deal with roughly 120 other pending Racial Justice Act claims.
On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Wayland J. Sermons, Jr. said he will review the closing arguments from the respective parties and issue a ruling, but did not specify when that would be.
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