Mr. Bacote is only one of a small number of individuals sentenced to death in North Carolina who was neither charged nor convicted of intentional and premeditated murder. Mr. Bacote will show evidence that race impacted not only jury selection in his case, but also in Johnston County and across the state of North Carolina. The prosecution removed Black jurors at three times the rate it removed white jurors in his case. Statewide, prosecutors struck Black jurors at more than twice the rate it struck all other jurors. Every Black defendant in Johnston County who has been tried for the death penalty received a death sentence, in a county that, in living memory, had multiple billboards proclaiming the county as “Klan Country,” and telling drivers to “love it or leave it.”
Mr. Bacote is represented by the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the Center for Death Penalty Litigation as well as attorneys James Ferguson, Jay Ferguson, and Malcolm Hunter."
- Prosecutors struck Black jurors because of NAACP membership, connections to historically black colleges, and living in majority-Black neighborhoods – and then claimed that those reasons were “race-neutral.”
- Prosecutors believed their strikes of Black jurors could not be racist because they had allowed other Black people to remain on the jury, as if the law ensured “a quota system and not a legitimate opportunity for every person.”
- Prosecutors in North Carolina, who are overwhelmingly white, questioned Black jurors with the presumption that they were dishonest or hostile to the state, asking them essentially to “prove to me that I can put you on the jury despite the fact that you’re Black.”
“Next to voting, serving on a jury is the most significant thing a citizen gets to do to participate in the democratic process,” Stevenson said. “It’s a big deal to contribute to democracy on a jury. And for a lot of people who have never had that opportunity, never had that chance, because of their race or their gender, it’s also a big deal when we continue to tolerate that exclusion.”
----------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------
GIST: "A historic Racial Justice Act hearing came to a close Friday after two weeks of testimony that illustrated the discrimination inherent in North Carolina’s death penalty. The evidence showed a clear and persistent pattern of racial bias in jury exclusions that denies people of color the opportunity to serve on capital juries and leads to a disproportionate number of extreme sentences for Black men, as well as a direct line between modern death sentences and the state’s history of racial terrorism.
“We have white prosecutors standing in front of overwhelmingly white juries comparing Black defendants facing the death penalty to animals – ‘mad dogs,’ ‘hyenas,’ ‘predators of the African plain,’” said Henderson Hill, senior counsel for the ACLU. “The racism in North Carolina’s application of the death penalty is so clear it’s blinding.”
The hearing began February 26, and centered on the case of Hasson Bacote, a Black man from Johnston County who was sentenced to death in 2009. Bacote argued that race played an impermissible role in jury selection – not just in his case, but in all death penalty cases in North Carolina. The lawsuit was filed in 2010 under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, and is likely to affect more than 100 people currently living on the state’s death row. Mr. Bacote is represented by the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, the Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, and attorney Jay Ferguson.
Bacote is one of eight Black men who have faced capital trials in Johnston County – all eight were sentenced to death. Nationally acclaimed public interest attorney Bryan Stevenson, who founded the Equal Justice Initiative and authored the book Just Mercy, took the stand to put Bacote’s case in context. Stevenson said the trial echoed trends he’s seen across the South, in which prosecutors strike black jurors for reasons that are clearly a pretext for race. He cited several examples of pervasive discrimination in jury selection, including:
- Prosecutors struck Black jurors because of NAACP membership, connections to historically black colleges, and living in majority-Black neighborhoods – and then claimed that those reasons were “race-neutral.”
- Prosecutors believed their strikes of Black jurors could not be racist because they had allowed other Black people to remain on the jury, as if the law ensured “a quota system and not a legitimate opportunity for every person.”
- Prosecutors in North Carolina, who are overwhelmingly white, questioned Black jurors with the presumption that they were dishonest or hostile to the state, asking them essentially to “prove to me that I can put you on the jury despite the fact that you’re Black.”
“Next to voting, serving on a jury is the most significant thing a citizen gets to do to participate in the democratic process,” Stevenson said. “It’s a big deal to contribute to democracy on a jury. And for a lot of people who have never had that opportunity, never had that chance, because of their race or their gender, it’s also a big deal when we continue to tolerate that exclusion.”
Tufts University social psychologist Sam Sommers took the stand to explain the concept of implicit bias, which drives people to discriminate even when they have no conscious intent. He said that strikes driven by “gut feelings” about jurors, as well as their body language and demeanor, can be heavily influenced by implicit bias.
Emory University historian Crystal Sanders testified to the full picture of racism in Johnston County, where her family has lived for generations and her ancestors were once enslaved. In addition to billboards promoting the Ku Klux Klan, which stood in several locations around Johnston County until the late 1970s, she cited many other examples of how Black people have been terrorized and disenfranchised in Johnston County, often at the hands of law enforcement and other leaders. Sanders detailed:
- Sustained Black voter suppression that has led to only a single Black person ever being elected to countywide office.
- Housing segregation enforced by threats, violence and cross burnings documented into the 1980s and 1990s.
- Public KKK rallies that happened as late as 2001.
- Egregious wrongful convictions of Black teenagers, including 16-year-old Terence Garner in 1998, which caused a national outcry.
- Police killings of restrained and subdued Black men that were never punished.
- Openly racist statements made by the county sheriff in the local newspaper.
University of North Carolina historian Seth Kotch testified about continuing lynching threats made against people facing the death penalty — threats that often came from people in the jury pool. He said modern capital trials reveal “the endurance of the idea that certain defendants deserve death rather than due process.”
This evidence was supported by several experts who provided statistical analyses showing that prosecutors across North Carolina used peremptory strikes to exclude qualified Black citizens from capital juries at more than twice the rate of white citizens. And in Johnston County, prosecutors struck qualified Black citizens from juries at three times the rate of whites.
In cases prosecuted by Greg Butler, who sent Bacote and several other men to death row, Black citizens were 10 times as likely to be struck. Butler used the racially coded term “thug” to describe Bacote to the jury.
During his testimony, Butler refused to acknowledge that racial bias, whether conscious or implicit, could have been a factor.
“I hope our state’s leaders will look at this incredible body of evidence and see it as a call to action,” said Gretchen Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. “So far, we’ve mostly seen our state’s prosecutors attempt to bury the evidence. Now, it’s time for us to come together, confront the facts head on, and figure out how we’re going to root out the deeply embedded racism in our courtrooms.”
The entire post can be read at:
https://www.cdpl.org/historic-hearing-challenging-racial-bias-in-north-carolinas-death-penalty-concludes-with-overwhelming-evidence-of-discrimination-in-capital-cases/PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/
---------------------------------------------------------------
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
——————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
------------------------------
YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
————————————————————————————————
MORE VALUABLE WORDS: "As a former public defender, Texas' refusal to delay Ivan Cantu's execution to evaluate new evidence is deeply worrying for the state of our legal system. There should be no room for doubt in a death penalty case. The facts surrounding Cantu's execution should haunt all of us."
