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Thread: Hassan Jamaal Bacote - North Carolina Death Row

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    Hassan Jamaal Bacote - North Carolina Death Row




    Summary of Offense:

    On April 14, 2009, a Johnston County court sentenced Hassan Jamaal Bacote to death.

    Bacote, then 23, of 3000 Twinfield Court in Raleigh, was found guilty of first-degree murder and other charges.

    Bacote was charged in February 2007 in the death Anthony Surles, 18, during what police said was a robbery attempt at a home on Hunting Drive in Selma. Surles was a student at Smithfield Selma High School.

    Marshals have also charged Jeffrey Lamont Evans and Antwain Nathaniel Groves in the crime.

    http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/4926950/

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    New Hearings on Reopened Death Penalty Cases Began Last Week

    The Outcomes Could Effectively End North Carolina's Death Penalty

    In February 2007, Hasson Jamaal Bacote was 19 years old when he and another man broke into a home in Selma, North Carolina, in an attempted robbery. Six people were inside, including 18-year-old Anthony Surles, a senior at Smithfield- Selma High School.

    Surles was shot and killed.

    Surles’ murder wasn’t premeditated, but based on Bacote’s already lengthy teenage criminal rap sheet, Bacote was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 2009.

    More than a decade later, Bacote’s case is back in court, thanks to a 2020 ruling from the North Carolina Supreme Court mandating that petitions of more than 100 death row inmates be heard by the courts due to evidence of racial bias in jury selection under the state’s Racial Justice Act. Not only does Bacote’s life depend on the outcome, but so does the future of the death penalty in North Carolina.

    “I don’t know that there’s a weaker case for the death penalty than Mr. Bacote,” says Gretchen Engel, executive director of The Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “This case, with all of the other evidence we have, [shows] that racism permeates the death penalty in our state and nationwide.”

    North Carolina has not executed anyone since 2006.

    In 2009, the state legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, banning the death penalty in cases where race was determined to be a factor in sentencing. The law was retroactive for the 145 inmates on death row at the time; however, it was repealed in 2013 after Republicans seized control of the legislature. A lengthy legal battle has been waged since, ending in the state Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that all pending petitions under the act had the right to be heard for reevaluation.

    Statistical evidence has shown that the state systematically discriminated against Black jurors, as upheld in death row inmate Marcus Robinson’s 2012 appeal against the state, which found that Black jurors were twice as likely to be excluded from selection. 20 % of inmates on North Carolina’s death row had been sentenced by an all-white jury, and about 1/4 of inmates had been convicted by a jury with only a single person of color, studies also showed. In cases with White victims, the defendant was nearly 3 times more likely to be sentenced to death.

    The bias was flippant in some cases, with prosecutors shown to have written notes calling jurors “blk wino,” or “blk, high drug.” Training sessions taught prosecutors to be more discreet in their decision-making by giving vague excuses like “body language” or “lack of eye contact” to keep Black jurors from the bench.

    Now, it will be the burden of the state to prove that race did not taint the jury selection in Bacote’s trial. According to Duke law professor James Coleman, the court’s decision regarding the statistical findings likely will impact the rest of the hearings.

    “If the court finds that evidence shows that race was a factor in Johnston County, then that decision will likely apply to other cases in Johnson County because the state will have had an opportunity to defend it in this case, and it doesn’t get a chance to challenge an issue that has already lost,” Coleman told the INDY. “So some of the evidence found in an individual case might be binding for the state in subsequent cases.”

    Bacote’s hearing began Friday when his legal team appeared before Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr. at the Wake County Courthouse to request documents from the state, including jury selection notes and training records. Should his appeal succeed, he will be re-sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

    Regardless of the outcome, it will likely be appealed to higher courts. The state Supreme Court currently has a liberal majority on the bench, but the case is unlikely to reach it until after the 2022 election.

    The hearing came, coincidentally, the same week that a North Carolina jury awarded $75 million—the largest-ever payout in a case of wrongful conviction—to former death row inmates Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who spent nearly 31 years in prison for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl found dead in a soybean field. They were exonerated in 2014 after DNA evidence implicated Roscoe Artis, who was already serving life in prison at the time, for the murder.

    The petitions slated to be heard under the Racial Justice Act will also be costly to the state, especially if, after the first few cases play out, Attorney General Josh Stein decides to continue trying each case individually.

    “I would be interested in whether the Attorney General is considering looking at some of these early cases as test cases with the idea that after some number, when the evidence is clear, that he will stop defending these cases and go in and confess error,”

    Coleman says. “I don’t think he would have the courage to do that but if you were a private law firm representing a client in a series of cases like these [...] at some point, you would advise your client that it is a waste of time to continue to defend these cases based on the evidence.”

    A spokesperson for Stein’s office declined to comment on the specifics of the cases.

    “Our office will follow the law as enacted by the legislature and in accordance with applicable court rulings,” they wrote via email.

    (source: indyweek.com)
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    North Carolina hearing over alleged racial bias in jury selection could upend death sentences

    By Erik Ortiz
    NBC News

    North Carolina's more than 135 death row inmates could potentially see their sentences changed to life in prison in the wake of a landmark hearing scheduled to begin next week that will test whether racial discrimination has played a role in jury selection in capital cases.

    The lead case focuses on Hasson Bacote, a Black man who was sentenced to death in 2009 by 10 white and two Black jurors for his role in a felony murder. Bacote, now 37, 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.

    Bacote sought to challenge his trial's outcome based on a groundbreaking state law known as the Racial Justice Act of 2009, which allowed death row inmates to seek resentences if they could show racial bias was a factor in their cases.

    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 like Bacote who 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.

    Now, Bacote's legal team, which includes lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, are gearing up for a trial court hearing to begin Monday in Johnston County. It could last two weeks.

    "We think the statistical evidence will be powerful and demonstrate the lasting impact of discrimination," Henderson Hill, senior counsel with the ACLU, told reporters Wednesday.

    Lawyers plan to call several historians, social scientists and others to establish a history and pattern of discrimination used in jury selection in Bacote's trial and in Johnston County, a majority-white suburban county of Raleigh that once prominently displayed Ku Klux Klan billboards during the Jim Crow era.

    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," and 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.

    Bacote's legal team also said its evidence will show that in Johnston County, the death penalty was 1½ times more likely to be sought and imposed on a Black defendant and two times more likely "in cases with minority defendants."

    Notes about jurors in other capital cases in North Carolina may also help bolster the evidence, with the ACLU saying it found references made by prosecutors about Black jurors' physical appearance, from dark skin tones to being referred to as a "thug."

    Meanwhile, the office of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein is attempting to delay the upcoming hearing, arguing in a court filing that the claims made by Bacote's lawyers are 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 state attorney general's office said in its court filing that racial bias in jury selection is "abhorrent," according to NBC affiliate WRAL in Raleigh, 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's office did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.

    Stein, a Democrat running for North Carolina governor in November, has taken heat from a primary challenger who questioned his office's stance in trying to halt the upcoming hearing.

    "It's shameful that my primary opponent AG Stein is trying to keep a Convicted Black defendant from getting his long-awaited day in court before early voting begins," Michael Morgan, a former state Supreme Court justice, wrote on X.

    The anticipated hearing comes amid a politically volatile election year in the state, as the seat held by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, will be up for grabs, along with Stein's attorney general position and a seat on the state Supreme Court, which now has a Republican majority.

    rolina was in 2006, prompting a de facto moratorium on death penalty cases. In light of the Racial Justice Act being repealed, Cooper has faced calls from anti-death penalty advocates to commute the sentences of the remaining death row inmates.

    "There's no question that our evidence in Hasson Bacote's case goes to this broader conversation that's happening in North Carolina over whether we should keep the death penalty or if the governor should commute the row," Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, said.

    In deciding whether Bacote's death sentence should be changed to life in prison, the judge could rule from the bench or make his decision at a later time, Stubbs said, adding that it could set a precedent.

    "Is there discrimination statewide in jury selection in North Carolina?" she asked. "That's the question at stake, that's the question that the judge will be answering."

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna139784
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