The Racial Justice Act brings evidence of death penalty racism into the light

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)

Johnston County was recently home to a historic hearing in the case of case of Hasson Bacote, a Black man who has spent 15 years on North Carolina’s death row. We now await the judge’s decision on whether Mr. Bacote will be removed from death row and resentenced to life in prison due to overwhelming evidence that racism affected his sentence — and all of North Carolina’s 136 death sentences.

I serve as president of the Johnston County Branch of the NAACP. After living and practicing as a dentist in Smithfield for more than 50 years, as well as receiving countless reports from members of my community, I can testify that racism stifles virtually every aspect of life in Johnston County, whether social, economic or political.

It begins as soon as our children enter school. Sometimes the discrimination is overt – I’ve talked to Black students who were pelted with cotton balls and told to pick cotton – but it can also be more subtle. Black students see their schools deprived of resources and crippled by “school choice” plans. I get reports of Black students who are shunted into less challenging courses or never called on in class. Rather than working to address the ongoing problem of racism in our schools, our county commissioners recently forced the school board to pass an “anti-CRT” policy forbidding our Black superintendent from teaching history that might be perceived as embarrassing to white students.

The KKK billboards that “welcomed” drivers to Smithfield until the mid-1970s have come down, and public lynchings and cross burnings on the lawns of black homeowners have thankfully ended. However, Confederate flags still fly in front of many homes. Housing segregation remains deeply entrenched, and voting districts have been carefully drawn to ensure that Black communities hold extremely limited power. In our entire history, only a single Black person has been elected to a countywide office, and we’ve never had a Black county commissioner.

At the courthouse where Mr. Bacote was sentenced to death, things are no better. Many Black people remember it as a place where they were cheated out of their land or wrongly prosecuted. The first Black lawyer didn’t open a practice in the county until the early 1970s, and still today, there remain far too few.

At Mr. Bacote’s hearing, I was unsurprised to learn that Black Johnstonians who respond to a juror summons are twice as likely to be excluded from the jury box as their white neighbors. Many Black people who have lived their entire lives in this county have never had a chance to serve on a jury.

It has often felt like the discrimination in our county – which is replicated in communities throughout North Carolina – is a sort of open secret. Everyone knows it exists, but no one in our public institutions is willing to talk about it. That’s why Mr. Bacote’s Racial Justice Act hearing was both gratifying and ground-breaking.

Lawyers and experts laid bare the stark inequities of the criminal punishment system. They not only presented proof of the enduring exclusion of Black jurors and the racist names used to refer to Black defendants facing the death penalty, but they showed how the modern death penalty connects to a long history of racial terror and segregation. Now, they will ask the judge to find that a racist death sentence cannot be carried out.

I sincerely hope that his case will be just the start. Every person on death row should get their day in court to show how race contributed to their sentence. If North Carolina’s courts were to fairly evaluate the evidence, they would see that in a state where rampant racism still goes unaddressed in every area of civic life, we cannot claim the power to kill.

In a state with our history, there is no such thing as a fair and impartial death sentence.