Focus on Race: Henderson Hill’s Legacy in the Death Penalty Movement

Henderson Hill has ded­i­cat­ed his career to plac­ing race and the death penal­ty on tri­al. This month, the Death Penalty Information Center cel­e­brates Black History Month by rec­og­niz­ing Mr. Hill’s ongo­ing con­tri­bu­tions to the mod­ern death penalty landscape. 

Mr. Hill’s exten­sive career in the death penal­ty move­ment brought him to var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing sev­er­al that he found­ed, such as the 8^th Amendment Project, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Raleigh, North Carolina, Charlotte Coalition for Moratorium Now (CCMN) and the Neighborhood Advocacy Center of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. 

Mr. Hill grad­u­at­ed from Harvard Law School in 1981 and began work­ing as a pub­lic defend­er in the District of Columbia. Over the course of his 10 years with the Public Defender Service, he served as a spe­cial lit­i­ga­tion coun­selor, deputy chief of the appel­late divi­sion, and train­ing direc­tor. Mr. Hill began work­ing full-time on death penal­ty issues in 1991 when he became the Director of the North Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center, as well as the found­ing Director of the sub­se­quent Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL). 

At CDPL, Mr. Hill’s work brought atten­tion to the many ways that racial dis­crim­i­na­tion infects use of the death penal­ty in North Carolina. While he was at CDPL, Mr. Hill was instru­men­tal in advo­cat­ing for the pas­sage of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (NCRJA) in 2009. The NCRJA was the sec­ond state-lev­el statute allow­ing death-sen­tenced peo­ple to use sta­tis­tics and broad pat­terns of dis­crim­i­na­tion to prove that race con­tributed to their death sen­tences. The men who have been resen­tenced under the NCRJA pre­vailed on issues show­ing racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in jury selec­tion. The NCRJA went on to inspire a third racial jus­tice act, this time in California, which passed in 2020.

Mr. Hill left CDPL in 1996 to become a part­ner at Ferguson Stein Chambers, a civ­il rights firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, for fif­teen years. Mr. Hill also worked as the direc­tor of the Federal Defenders of Western North Carolina before becom­ing the found­ing direc­tor of the 8^th Amendment Project. 

At the 8^th Amendment Project, Mr. Hill cre­at­ed a nation­al strat­e­gy and unit­ed state-lev­el cam­paigns to work toward abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty. One of the core prin­ci­ples of the orga­ni­za­tion is that the death penal­ty has been applied in a racial­ly biased man­ner, a belief of Mr. Hill’s that has always cen­tered his work. Mr. Hill left the 8^th Amendment Project in 2019 to serve as Special Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project. 

Mr. Hill’s work at the ACLU CPP focused pri­mar­i­ly on chal­leng­ing racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in jury selec­tion. Mr. Hill most recent­ly served as one of the attor­neys for Hasson Bacote, who sought relief under the NCRJA last year. Like every oth­er Black per­son tried cap­i­tal­ly in Johnston County, North Carolina, Mr. Bacote was sen­tenced to death. Mr. Bacote’s team dis­cov­ered that pros­e­cu­tors struck three times as many Black prospec­tive jurors than they struck white prospec­tive jurors in his case. On February 7, 2025, a North Carolina judge ruled “[r]ace was a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor” in both jury selec­tion and the deci­sion to impose death in Mr. Bacote’s case. As a result of this rul­ing, Mr. Bacote was grant­ed relief from his death sen­tence under the NCRJA. Mr. Bacote also received a com­mu­ta­tion from for­mer Governor Roy Cooper in December 2024.