North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, on his last day in office Tuesday, commuted the death sentences of 15 inmates to life in prison without parole.
One of the prisoners receiving clemency was convicted murderer Hasson Bacote, a Black man who had challenged his sentence under the Racial Justice Act of 2009, a groundbreaking state law that allows condemned inmates to seek resentencing if they can show racial bias played a role in their cases.
The reprieves came as Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr. was considering the case of Bacote, who was sentenced to death in 2009 by 10 white and two Black jurors.
“These reviews are among the most difficult decisions a Governor can make and the death penalty is the most severe sentence that the state can impose,” Cooper said in a statement. “After thorough review, reflection, and prayer, I concluded that the death sentence imposed on these 15 people should be commuted, while ensuring they will spend the rest of their lives in prison.”
While Cooper insisted that “no single factor was determinative in the decision on any one case,” among the factors considered were “potential influence of race, such as the race of the defendant and victim, composition of the jury pool and the final jury.”
Death penalty opponents had been urging Cooper to commute the sentences of all 136 prisoners currently on death row in North Carolina. While the Democratic governor stopped short of that, no prisoner has been executed by the state since 2006.
Cooper’s move was applauded by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, and others working to overturn the death penalty.
“This decision is a historic step towards ending the death penalty in North Carolina,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project said in a statement.
The other inmates whose sentences were commuted are:
Iziah Barden, 67, convicted in Sampson County in 1999; Nathan Bowie, 53, convicted in Catawba County in 1993; Rayford Burke, 66, convicted in Iredell County in 1993; Elrico Fowler, 49, convicted in Mecklenburg County in 1997; Cerron Hooks, 46, convicted in Forsyth County in 2000; Guy LeGrande, 65, convicted in Stanly County in 1996; James Little, 38, convicted in Forsyth County in 2008; Robbie Locklear, 52, convicted in Robeson County in 1996; Lawrence Peterson, 55, convicted in Richmond County in 1996; William Robinson, 41, convicted in Stanly County in 2011; Christopher Roseboro, 60, convicted in Gaston County in 1997; Darrell Strickland, 66, convicted in Union County in 1995; Timothy White, 47, convicted in Forsyth County in 2000; Vincent Wooten, 52, convicted in Pitt County in 1994.
Sermons began reviewing the Bacote case in February, after the ACLU and other groups filed a challenge on behalf of the condemned man from Johnston County.
Now 38, Bacote has been held in a Raleigh prison as death sentences in North Carolina remain on hold, in part, due to legal disputes and difficulties obtaining lethal injection drugs.
The law that Bacote used to challenge his sentence was passed in 2009. But in 2013, then-Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, repealed the law, arguing that it “created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice.”
But the state Supreme Court in 2020 ruled in favor of many of the inmates, allowing those who, like Bacote, had already filed challenges in their cases, to move ahead.
At the time, nearly every person on death row, including both Black and white prisoners, filed for reviews under the Racial Justice Act, according to The Associated Press.
During Bacote’s two-week trial court hearing, several historians, social scientists, statisticians and others testified that the jury selection process in Johnston County, a majority-white suburban area near Raleigh that prominently displayed Ku Klux Klan billboards during the Jim Crow era, had long been infected by racism.
In court filings, Bacote’s lawyers suggested that local prosecutors at the time of his trial were “nearly two times more likely to exclude people of color from jury service than to exclude whites.” 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, the lawyers argued.
Bacote’s legal team also provided evidence that indicated that in Johnston County, the death penalty was 1 ½ times more likely to be sought and imposed on a Black defendant and two times more likely “in cases with minority defendants.”
The office of North Carolina’s then-attorney general, Josh Stein, had sought to delay Bacote’s hearing. They argued in a court filing that the claims made by Bacote’s lawyers were based, in part, on a Michigan State University study that the North Carolina Supreme Court had already found last year to be “unreliable and fatally flawed.”
While the AG’s office said in its court filing that racial bias in jury selection is “abhorrent,” the office added that a “claim of racial discrimination cannot be presumed based on the mere assertion of a defendant; it must be proved.”
Stein, a Democrat, is now the governor-elect of North Carolina.
