Last month, a North Carolina Superior Court judge heard testimony on a historic trial under the Racial Justice Act about the history and inherent racial discrimination in the State’s administration of the death penalty. The trial will determine the future of Hasson Bacote, a man living on death row who argues that race played a ruinous role in the jury selection of his first-degree murder trial.
North Carolina has an extensive history of racial terrorism that is directly connected to the way the state handles modern death sentences. One of the main issues presented is the way jury exclusions make it more likely for Black people to be struck from serving on capital juries. White juries pave the way for a disproportionate number of extreme sentences for Black men.
For updates on this case, fill out this form from our partners at the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
The notorious former prosecutor, Joe Freeman Britt, and his impact on the racist legacy of death penalty cases during the 1970s and 1980s loomed over the RJA hearings. He is known as the “deadliest prosecutor” for the sheer quantity of death sentences he obtained and pushed.
Emancipate NC’s Ian Mance told the Border Belt Independent:
“It’s such an outrageous thing that happened to these men and for [Britt] to go and lament that they hadn’t been executed after it came out he had convicted the wrong people — I’m hard pressed to think of someone who just did more to illustrate their unfitness for a position of prosecutor.”