2009 The North Carolina General Assembly adopted the Racial Justice Act, a first of its kind law allowing people on death row to use statistics and broad patterns of discrimination to prove that race contributed to their death sentences. Those who could prove race was a significant factor would be resentenced to life without parole.
2009-2010 Researchers at Michigan State University undertook a comprehensive study of the effect of race on North Carolina’s death penalty. The study revealed statewide racial disparities in charging, sentencing, and jury selection in capital cases tried in North Carolina between 1990 and 2010.
2010 Most people on North Carolina’s death row filed claims under the RJA, citing the MSU study.
2012 The first RJA evidentiary hearing was held in the case of Cumberland County’s Marcus Robinson. Following a two-week hearing, Chief Resident Superior Court Judge Gregory A. Weeks vacated Robinson’s death sentence and resentenced him to life imprisonment. Judge Weeks found that prosecutors in Cumberland County and across the state engaged in systemic discrimination against African American jurors, removing them from juries at over twice the rate of white citizens.
Months after the Robinson decision, a newly elected NC General Assembly amended and narrowed the RJA.
Later that fall, a second RJA hearing was held in three more Cumberland County death row cases: Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin, and Christina Walters. Judge Weeks again ruled that race was a significant factor in prosecutors’ peremptory strike decisions. He resentenced all three defendants to life imprisonment. Among Judge Weeks’ findings were that prosecutors used a “cheat sheet” of manufactured answers to justify striking African-American citizens from juries, and that they wrote racially-charged notes about potential black jurors, such as “blk wino – drugs” or being from a “respectable blk family” or from a “blk/high drug” area.
2013 The State appealed Judge Weeks’ decisions in all of the Cumberland County RJA cases. Soon after, the General Assembly repealed the RJA.
2015 The North Carolina Supreme Court overturned the four Cumberland County cases and sent them back to the trial court. The Supreme Court found no specific problem with Judge Weeks’ determinations about prosecutors’ improper use of race in jury selection, but instead found that the prosecution should have been given more time to prepare its own statistical study and that the judge should not have consolidated the cases of three defendants into one hearing.
2016 The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to hear two capital cases where RJA motions were filed, but never heard in court. These cases raised the question of whether the repeal of the RJA could be applied retroactively to void claims filed prior to the repeal. The defendants in these two Iredell County cases were Rayford Burke and Andrew Ramseur.
2017 The superior court dismissed the RJA motions of the four Cumberland defendants without granting new hearings, and the defendants once again appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court.
2018 The Cumberland defendants filed their opening briefs in the state supreme court, along with supporting amicus briefs from groups including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP of North Carolina, NC Association of Black Lawyers, prominent civil rights advocates, and a coalition of former prosecutors.
2019 The NC Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases of the Cumberland 4 and Iredell 2.
2020 In a historic decision on the two Iredell cases, the NC Supreme Court ruled that all death-sentenced people who had filed claims under the Racial Justice Act were entitled to hearings where they could present evidence that prosecutors excluded African-American citizens from their juries and that racism tainted their trials. In two subsequent decisions, the court ruled that the Cumberland 4, who had clearly proven discrimination in their cases, must be removed from death row and resentenced to life without parole. The decisions noted North Carolina’s “egregious legacy of the racially discriminatory application” of the death penalty and said that discrimination in criminal cases “undermines the integrity of our judicial system and extends to society as a whole.”
2021 The NC Supreme Court began hearings in the next phase of litigation under the Racial Justice Act, with the Johnston County case of death row prisoner Hasson Bacote serving as the lead case. Bacote has sought extensive records from the state in order to prove widespread discrimination, not just in his own case but in death penalty cases across North Carolina.
2024 During a two week evidentiary hearing in February and March, attorneys for Hasson Bacote presented evidence of a clear and persistent pattern of racial bias in jury selection that denies people of color across North Carolina the opportunity to serve on capital juries and leads to a disproportionate number of extreme sentences for Black men. Witnesses included statisticians, social scientists, historians and acclaimed public interest attorney Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. These experts testified to patterns of discrimination in North Carolina capital trials and exposed the link between modern death sentences and the state’s history of racial terror. A decision in the case is expected later this year.
2025 A judge found that race played a key role in the death penalty trial of Hasson Bacote, influencing both the makeup of his jury and the decision to sentence a Black man to death. Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons also found that racial discrimination extends beyond Bacote’s case, poisoning all death sentences in Johnston County and the prosecutorial district that also includes Harnett and Lee counties. A few weeks before the judge issued his decision, Mr. Bacote received a commutation from then-Gov. Roy Cooper. He is now serving life without parole.
