By Yana Singhal
RALEIGH, NC – Attorneys delivered closing arguments Monday in North Carolina v. Hasson Bacote, a landmark case filed under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act that could affect more than 100 people on the state’s death row, according to a press release by the ACLU.
The ACLU notes how the case follows “Hasson Bacote, a Black man sentenced to death in 2009, who first filed a lawsuit in 2010 challenging his sentence on the grounds that race played an impermissible role in jury selection in his case, and in all death penalty cases across North Carolina.”
Represented by numerous parties, including the ACLU, the director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, Cassandra Stubbs, charged, “This fight for justice has been 15 years in the making. The outcome of this case will not just determine if Hasson Bacote’s life is spared, but if North Carolina will continue to condone systemic racial injustice in its courts and criminal legal system.”
The current case, the ACLU claims, showcases the 2009 North Carolina Racial Justice Act (RJA) that “allowed people to challenge their death sentences if they could show race played a role in their trials. Those who prove racism stand to be resentenced to life without parole.”
The ACLU added that while “the state legislature repealed the statute in 2013, the legal team brought a challenge in the North Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled in 2020 that those who had already filed claims under the RJA were entitled to hearings, and that led to Bacote’s case now playing a major factor that’s ‘outcome could affect the cases of everyone else on death row.’”
Another defense firm in the case, Center for Death Penalty Litigation, said, “The evidence of racism could not be more stark.”
The ACLU noted how “Black citizens have been denied their right to a voice in the jury box and prosecutors have referred to Black defendants as ‘thugs’ and ‘predators of the African plain.’ When the punishment is as severe and final as the death penalty, we cannot tolerate discrimination in the system.”
The hearing began earlier this year on Feb. 26 and lasted two weeks, resuming this week for closing arguments. Prominent historians, statisticians, and other researchers who gave expert testimony, put forth an unprecedented showing of discrimination by prosecutors in jury selections across North Carolina, as well as by juries in Johnston County against Black defendants,” said the ACLU.
“Bacote’s attorneys also presented evidence linking modern death sentences to the state’s history of racial terror and violence.” The case “is a historic opportunity to address a long, sordid history of systemic racism that has infected the criminal legal system broadly and the death penalty specifically. We are hopeful that the court will rule in the interests of justice,” added the ACLU in its statement.
