On Friday, a North Carolina superior court judge ruled that race played a distinct role in jury selection for Hasson Bacote, a 38-year-old man who spent 15 years on death row before his sentence was commuted to life in prison last December.
Bacote was sentenced to death in 2009 after a predominantly white jury found him guilty of shooting someone during a robbery. His attorneys noted that there was racial bias in the courtroom, in which the judge and all lawyers were white and prosecutors struck Black jurors at three times the rate of white jurors.
