As closing arguments of his trial began in Johnston County, North Carolina, Hasson Bacote watched as Assistant District Attorney Gregory Butler urged the jury to sentence him to death. Mr. Bacote, a Black man, had been convicted of fatally shooting 18-year-old Anthony Surles during a robbery when Mr. Bacote was just 21 years old. Mr. Bacote admitted he had fired a single shot out of a trailer, but said he did not know that he hit anyone. “Hasson Bacote is a thug: cold-blooded and without remorse,” Mr. Butler told the jury, which consisted of 10 white people and 2 Black people. Mr. Butler had struck potential Black jurors from Mr. Bacote’s trial at over three times the rate of white jurors. The jury voted to sentence Mr. Bacote to death.
In 2009, the same year Mr. Bacote was sentenced, North Carolina legislators passed the Racial Justice Act (RJA), which gave death row prisoners the opportunity to prove that racial bias was a factor in their case — and win a life without parole sentence if successful. Mr. Bacote’s legal team quickly applied for RJA relief, but in 2013, the legislature repealed the RJA and attempted to nullify the more than 130 claims that had already been filed. After years of litigation, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the repeal of the RJA was not retroactive and the claims could move forward. Mr. Bacote’s claim was the first to proceed to an evidentiary hearing.
At the hearing in 2024, Mr. Bacote’s attorneys presented statistical analysis showing that potential Black jurors in Johnston County were four times more likely to be struck than white jurors — and ten times more likely to be struck if Mr. Butler was the prosecutor. They also highlighted Mr. Butler’s closing argument in another trial, where Mr. Butler called the Black defendant and his codefendants “wild dogs,” “hyenas,” and “predators of the African plain.” Mr. Butler, now retired, testified in the hearing that he “never, ever struck a juror without having race-neutral reasons.”
But before the court issued its decision on Mr. Bacote’s RJA claim, outgoing Governor Roy Cooper commuted the death sentences of fifteen people to life without parole on December 31, 2024, his last day in office. Mr. Bacote was the first name on the list. Gov. Cooper did not specify why he granted clemency in each individual case, but noted that the “potential influence of race, such as the race of the defendant and victim, composition of the jury pool and the final jury, and evidence and testimony offered at trial” played a key role in his decision. Thirteen of the fifteen men who received clemency from Governor Cooper are Black.
In February 2025, the RJA court ruled in Mr. Bacote’s favor, finding that racial bias pervaded his and other death sentences in North Carolina, a state with a long history of racial violence and terror. “In Johnston County, Black defendants like Mr. Bacote have faced a 100 percent chance of receiving a death sentence, while white defendants have a better than even chance of receiving a life sentence,” the court wrote. The court further recognized Mr. Butler’s “history of denigrating Black defendants in thinly veiled racist terms.” The court found statistical disparities in the entire prosecutorial district encompassing Mr. Bacote’s case; prosecutors there struck Black jurors at nearly twice the rate of all other jurors. The court also noted examples from 18 other counties where prosecutors had “introduced offensive stereotypes and characterizations, commented on skin shade and body types, denigrated women, and/or used animal imagery” to describe jurors; used “proxies” for race to mark jurors, such as neighborhood, group membership, attendance at a historically Black college, or following Black-owned media; offered disparate or outright false reasons for striking Black jurors; or otherwise injected racial bias into voir dire proceedings. This ruling implicates over 100 pending RJA claims in North Carolina and speaks to the pervasive nature of capital jury discrimination throughout American history.
The Long History of Racial Bias in Jury Selection
Racial bias in jury selection has been a feature of capital punishment throughout American history. Only white men were legally permitted to serve on juries for the first eighty-odd years of the republic. Following the Civil War, new legal protections, including the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, affirmed the legal right of Black men to serve on juries. In Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), the United States Supreme Court held that racial discrimination against jurors of color creates “a brand upon them, affixed by law; an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to that race prejudice which is an impediment to securing to individuals of the race that equal justice which the law aims to secure to all others.”
