Hasson Bacote trial continues Tuesday, experts testify that race played a role in his conviction
The Racial Justice Act hearing of Hasson Bacote continues this week in Johnston County.
Bacote is arguing that past indications of racism in the courtroom hurt his right to a fair trial.
The Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) said experts will be revealing groundbreaking evidence that connects the modern death penalty to North Carolina’s history of racial violence and discriminatory law enforcement. Expert witnesses will include historians, social scientists and Bryan Stevenson, a capital defense attorney who founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
“It is hard to overstate the significance of what’s happening in Johnston County right now," said Gretchen Engel, CDPL executive director. "Typically, we look at death penalty cases one by one, focusing only on the facts of a single case. The Racial Justice Act has given us the rare chance to step back and see the full picture.
"When we do that, it is shockingly clear that our state’s history of racial violence did not simply disappear; it transformed into the modern death penalty."
Bacote is represented by the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and North Carolina Attorney Jay Ferguson.
The CDPL said Bacote was convicted in Johnston County, where racism has been openly displayed. The county is infamous for some residents’ history of Ku Klux Klan support.
"When you take in the full scope of history, the question becomes obvious: How could we ever trust this system — which continues to be carried out almost exclusively by white authorities in places with stark records of racial terror — to fairly decide whether a Black man should live or die?" Engel said.
"If we do not reckon with our history, North Carolina will continue to carry out racist death sentences."
In 1977, Johnston County was home to North Carolina’s first capital prosecution under the state’s modern death penalty statute. In that very first case, a judge found that Black people were illegally excluded from the grand jury that indicted the two Black defendants who were on trial for the killings of two white men. The CDPL said those same problems persist today.
To this day, the CDPL said the county has never elected a Black county commissioner and a sheriff who made openly racist statements in a local newspaper remains in office.
On Monday, Dr. Crystal Sanders, a Johnston County native and professor of African American studies at Emory University, will present a detailed county history that includes the following:
- The 1998 wrongful conviction of 16-year-old Terence Garner, which Johnston County officials refused to overturn even after another man confessed. Garner was finally freed in 2002, after a national outcry.
- The 1986 police killing of Ellis King Jr., a Black man who called police to report a theft. No officers were punished for shooting King in the back of the head while he was restrained face-down on his parents’ front lawn.
- Housing segregation enforced by threats, violence and cross burnings through at least the 1980s.
- Sustained Black voter suppression that has led to only a single Black person ever being elected to countywide office.
- A history of lynchings attended by thousands of people, many of whom wielded power in the legal system until the modern day.
On Wednesday, Stevenson will testify about the links between modern jury discrimination and a history of excluding Black people from juries. Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative has documented how racially skewed juries lead to wrongful convictions and disproportionate sentences for people of color.
Other experts who will testify this week include Dr. Seth Kotch, a professor in UNC’s Department of American Studies who has documented the link between lynching and the death penalty, and Dr. Sam Sommers, a social psychologist at Tufts University who studies the effect of implicit bias on decision-making, including in jury selection.
Defense attorneys will also question Greg Butler, the prosecutor who tried Bacote. The CDPL said statistical analysis found that Butler struck Black jurors from capital trials at more than ten times the rate of white jurors. He referred to Bacote as a "thug" and compared other Black defendants to "predators of the African plain."
Testimony begins Monday at 10 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Johnston County Courthouse. It will also be livestreamed on WRAL.com.
