Racial bias sullied the jury selection process during the trial of a Black man in North Carolina who was ultimately sentenced to death for his crimes, a state court judge said Friday in a landmark ruling that could have a ripple effect for more than 100 ongoing capital punishment challenges across the Tar Heel State.

In a 120-page order, Judge Wayland J. Sermons Jr. said race had an outsize impact on jury selection in Hasson Bacote's 2009 trial, in which prosecutors struck qualified Black jurors at three times the rate of any other prospective juror, and the lead prosecutor was found to have a "history of denigrating Black defendants in thinly veiled racist terms," the judge said.

"Statistical evidence shows that race was a significant factor in prosecution decisions about who serves as jurors in death penalty cases in Mr. Bacote's case, in cases in Johnston County, and cases in Prosecutorial District 11, where prosecutors struck Black venire members at vastly disproportionate rates compared to venire members of other races," Judge Sermons said.

Bacote had challenged his sentence under North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, or RJA, which carved out a legal pathway for defendants on death row to rewrite their punishment if they could prove race played a significant role in their sentence. Those who succeeded were entitled to be resentenced to life without parole.

Lawmakers repealed the law in 2013, but the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that petitioners with pending RJA challenges could see them through.

Bacote's was the first case to make it to an evidentiary hearing, in February 2024. During the hearing, defense counsel brought statistical, social and historical evidence that they argued pointed to a pattern of racial bias on capital juries.

On his last day in office, former Gov. Roy Cooper commuted Bacote's sentence, along with 14 other people on death row in North Carolina, giving them life without parole instead. State prosecutors tried to have Bacote's RJA challenge thrown out as a result, arguing that Cooper's clemency mooted the case.

But Judge Sermons rejected that bid on Feb. 3, noting that at least 100 other people facing the death penalty in North Carolina have pending RJA claims.

He said there is a "100% chance" those individuals will push forward with evidentiary hearings in their cases, and the "final determination in this case will be instrumental in the disposition of the remaining RJA cases."

Bacote was accused of shooting an 18-year-old who fled from a trailer where he and a co-defendant were attempting to rob five people in 2007, according to the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which represented Bacote in his death penalty challenge. The center said Bacote fired a single shot in the teen's direction, and no one realized he had been shot until they eventually "went outside and found him collapsed on the ground."

Now 38, Bacote was 22 years old when a predominantly white jury in Johnston County, North Carolina, convicted him in April 2009 on charges of felony first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit burglary, conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon, attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon and first-degree burglary, according to Friday's order.

Felony murder allows for someone accused of committing a violent felony to be charged with murder if someone is killed in the course of committing that felony. According to the Cornell Legal Information Institute, a person can be charged with felony murder "even if they had no intention of killing someone."

Following his conviction, the jury recommended that Bacote be sentenced to death, which the trial court imposed.

But Judge Sermons said Friday that statistical evidence presented during Bacote's two-week evidentiary hearing last year showed that prosecutors in the district where Bacote was tried as well as Johnston County as a whole struck Black jurors at 1.83 and 1.9 times the rate of other jurors, respectively.

The lead prosecutor in Bacote's case — Gregory C. Butler, who has since retired — struck Black jurors at 3.48 times the rate he struck other jurors, the judge said. And during Bacote's trial specifically, prosecutors struck Black jurors at 3.3 times the rate of others.

According to the order, a "wealth of expert testimony" established "a strong causal association between the prosecution's exercise of peremptory strikes and race."

As a whole, Judge Sermons said, race played a significant role in capital punishment cases throughout Johnston County — a mostly rural county in eastern North Carolina — where he said "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 judge also noted that Bacote is one of just 11 people in North Carolina convicted of felony murder who was sentenced to death. He said all 11 of those individuals are people of color, and nine are Black men.

Butler, the lead prosecutor in Bacote's case, was also known to use racist terminology when referring to Black defendants, according to the order. Judge Sermons cited evidence of Butler describing Black defendants as "predators of the African plain," a "piece of trash" and, in Bacote's case, a "thug."

The judge said racial discrimination in the jury selection process undermines confidence in the justice system, while "a death sentence tainted by race likewise harms defendants and impugns the legitimacy of the criminal punishment system as a whole."

"The evidence that race drives jury selection and jury sentencing decisions in capital cases is repugnant and cries out for a remedy," he said. "The RJA is that remedy."

In his parting words, however, Judge Sermons acknowledged that each RJA challenge should be "handled separately, individually, and on the basis of their facts."

"It is obvious to the court, after having managed this action for many years, that the claims of Mr. Bacote must be decided primarily upon the facts and circumstances of his individual case, and the statistical evidence of the county and district and any other relevant acts of the state, and applying the language of the Racial Justice Act to those facts to reach a proper determination," he said.

In a statement Friday following the decision, Bacote said he was "deeply grateful to my family, my lawyers, the experts, and to everyone who fought for justice — not just in my case, but for so many others."

"When my death sentence was commuted by Gov. Cooper, I felt enormous relief that the burden of the death penalty — and all of the stress and anxiety that go with it — were lifted off my shoulders," he continued. "I am grateful to the court for having the courage to recognize that racial bias affected my case and so many others. I remain hopeful that the fight for truth and justice will not stop here."

Counsel for Bacote celebrated the victory Friday. Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, called the decision "more definitive proof that capital prosecutions in North Carolina are tainted with racial bias and discrimination." 

Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, who also represented Bacote, said Judge Sermons' ruling "affirms what we have argued all along: Racism infects the death penalty."

"We are hopeful that future decisions will result in relief under the RJA for other North Carolinians currently on death row," she said.

Gretchen M. Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, called the judge's decision a "damning indictment of the death penalty," saying it "should serve as a call for every North Carolina death sentence to be reexamined."

A spokesperson for the state Justice Department on Friday told Law360 the department plans to appeal.

The state is represented by Jonathan Babb, Marissa Jensen and Ben Szany of the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Bacote is represented by Jay H. Ferguson of Thomas Ferguson & Beskind LLP, Cassandra Stubbs, Henderson Hill and Megan Byrne of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ashley Burrell of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Shelagh Kenney and Kailey Morgan of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.

The case is State of North Carolina vs. Hasson Jamaal Bacote, case number 07CRS51499, in North Carolina Superior Court, District 11B.

--Editing by Rich Mills.