N.C. Judge Finds Racial Discrimination Occurred During Jury Selection In Black Death Row Inmate’s Case

Bacote, 38, had been seeking to have his death sentence changed to life in prison as a result of the judge’s ruling. But that happened on Dec. 31, when outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the death sentences of 15 inmates, including Bacote’s, to life in prison without parole.

While Cooper insisted that “no single factor was determinative in the decision on any one case,” among the factors considered were the “potential influence of race, such as the race of the defendant and victim, composition of the jury pool and the final jury.”

Cooper’s act of clemency for Bacote provides a reprieve from death row. Still, Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr.’s decision Friday could have a far-reaching affect on many of the other 122 inmates facing the death chamber.

If Sermons agrees that Bacote’s request for resentencing is warranted, legal experts contend that would set a precedent for the other death row inmates seeking relief under the Racial Justice Act.

In 2013, the Racial Justice Act was repealed by then-Gov. Pat McCrory, who believed it created a “loophole to avoid the death penalty.” However, inmates who filed for case reviews before McCrory’s decision, which was nearly every death row inmate of every race at the time the Racial Justice Act was signed, can still pursue those reviews.

BREAKING: A North Carolina judge ruled today that race played an impermissible role in jury selection for Hasson Bacote, a Black man who challenged his death sentence under the North Carolina Racial Justice Act (RJA). https://t.co/f8Y1Zd8uL9 pic.twitter.com/1WIjoxl4mM

— Legal Defense Fund (@NAACP_LDF) February 7, 2025

Last year, Judge Sermons heard arguments from Hasson Bacote’s legal team, which presented a detailed history and pattern of racial discrimination in jury selection practices in Johnston County, southeast of Raleigh, which would include their client’s case. The attorneys brought in experts who testified that local prosecutors at the time of Bacote’s trial were nearly two times more likely to exclude potential jurors of color than they were to exclude white jurors. Defense attorneys also argued that “in Bacote’s case, prosecutors chose to strike prospective Black jurors from the jury pool at more than three times the rate of prospective white jurors,” NBC reported.

Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, which is also helping to represent Bacote, noted that, during his criminal trial, Bacote was referred to by prosecutors as a “thug, coldhearted and without remorse” and argued such language “taps into this false narrative of the super predator myth.” Hasson Bacote’s lawyers called in historians, social scientists, statisticians and other experts to establish a long history of judicial bias, but prosecutors argued none of it was relevant to the case presently before the court. 

Prosecutors insisted that the case wasn’t about “whether racism has existed in our state,” because if it was, “there is no need for a hearing in this case or any other case.”

“But that’s not the question before this court,” state Department of Justice Attorney Jonathan Babb argued. “Rather, the question is whether this death sentence in this case was solely obtained on the basis of race. The defendant has not shown that his sentence was solely obtained on the basis of race.”

Apparently, the judge disagreed.