In 2009, a jury condemned Hasson Bacote to death for killing 18-year-old Selma resident Anthony Surles during a home invasion.
However, he will now serve life in jail without parole for the 2007 shooting death of Surles, a Smithfield-Selma High School student.
In one of his final acts as governor, Roy Cooper commuted the death sentences of Bacote and 14 others on North Carolina’s death row.
“After thorough review, reflection and prayer, I concluded that the death sentence imposed on these 15 people should be commuted, while ensuring they will spend the rest of their lives in prison,” according to Cooper.
His commutation order to Bacote was brief. “It has been made to appear to me that this case is one fit for a commutation,” Mr. Cooper explained. The governor didn’t elaborate.
A jury of ten whites and two blacks sentenced Bacote to death. However, in a case pending a judge’s decision, he challenged his sentence under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act. This statute allows offenders to challenge their death sentences if they can demonstrate that race played a role in the decision.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, and Bacote attorney Jay Ferguson all praised Cooper’s commutations on his website.
“Today’s commutations, the first of this scale in North Carolina, are a step towards addressing the harms and racial disparities of the death penalty in North Carolina,” according to the article.
Cassandra Stubbs is the director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. “This decision is a historic step towards ending the death penalty in North Carolina, but the fight for justice does not end here,” she told the crowd.
Though the reduction of Bacote’s death sentence rendered his legal appeal irrelevant, Stubbs said the ACLU still expected a judgment from the judge. “We remain hopeful that the court will issue a ruling under the state’s Racial Justice Act in Mr. Bacote’s case that we can leverage for relief for the many others that still remain on death row,” the attorney general stated.
Ashley Burrell is Senior Counsel with the Legal Defense Fund. “Today’s decision is one step closer towards redressing the death penalty’s long history of racialized, systemic violence,” she told reporters.
Shelagh Kenney, deputy director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, stated that Bacote had presented his argument in court. “Mr. Bacote brought forth unequivocal evidence … that the death penalty is racist,” she informed me. “Through years of investigation and the examination of thousands of pages of documents, his case revealed a deep entanglement between the death penalty and North Carolina’s history of segregation and racial terror.”
“We are glad Mr. Bacote received the relief he deserves,” Kenney said. “And we hope Gov. Cooper’s action will be a step toward ending North Carolina’s racist and error-prone death penalty for good.”
The post Cooper commutes Johnston’s death sentence originally published on Restoration News Media.