‘Johnston County is Klan Country,’ expert says in Racial Justice Act hearing

Crystal Sanders did not think the billboards were that well known. They’d come down before she’d been born, erected in the 1960s as a response to the Civil Rights Movement: A robed white man with a burning cross encouraged passersby to fight communism and integration by joining the Ku Klux Klan. But when Sanders got to Duke University in the early 2000s and told a class she was from Clayton, her professor had an immediate reaction.

“The professor says, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re from Clayton.’ And he says to the rest of the class, ‘Clayton is a part of Johnson County, and Johnston County is Klan Country,'” Sanders said. “That was very telling to me, because I did not know that the county had this reputation among people who did not live in the county.”

Sanders, now a professor of African American studies at Emory University, recounted the story in a courtroom in the Johnston County courthouse Monday.

Sixty years earlier, one of those billboards was just blocks from that courthouse. Any Black people reporting for jury duty from west of Smithfield would have had to drive past it.

“It sends a message of white supremacy, it sends a message of racial intimidation,” Sanders said. “It undergirds the fact that the courthouse was essentially a ‘whites’ only’ space.”

Sanders was in court Monday to testify in an ongoing evidentiary hearing for Hasson Bacote, a Black man on North Carolina’s death row whose attorneys are trying to get resentenced to life in prison. Their arguments rely on the Racial Justice Act, a law that gives those on death row a path to getting resentenced if they can prove prosecutors sought or obtained their death sentences because of their race.

Bacote’s attorneys have argued his case is not just about him. Using information gleaned from the 680,000 pages turned over by the state in preparation for the hearing, Bacote’s legal team has likened North Carolina’s death penalty to “a legacy of racial terrorism,” that the state’s history of racial violence informs the present-day use of capital punishment.

“It is hard to overstate the significance of what’s happening in Johnston County right now,” Gretchen M. Engel, the executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, said in a statement. “Typically, we look at death penalty cases one by one, focusing only on the facts of a single case. The Racial Justice Act has given us the rare chance to step back and see the full picture. When we do that, it is shockingly clear that our state’s history of racial violence did not simply disappear; it transformed into the modern death penalty.”

All the experts who testified last week talked about their research on jury selection in capital trials both across North Carolina and in Johnston County. A professor at Michigan State University College of Law said that her research showed that Black prospective jurors were more than 2.5 times more likely to be struck from a jury pool statewide, four times more likely to be struck from a jury pool in Johnston County and 10 times more likely to be struck in cases tried by Assistant District Attorney Gregory C. Butler, who also prosecuted Bacote.

Another expert testified that every Black person who has faced a jury in a capital trial in Johnston County between 1991 and 2014 received a death sentence; none were given a life sentence.

Sanders’ testimony was different. Rooted in history, Sanders explored how Johnston County’s past could explain racial disparities in jury selection and the imposition of the death penalty.

She did that by pointing to a multitude of examples of discrimination and racial terror in the county: the Klan burning crosses in the yards of Black families that had moved into white neighborhoods; Smithfield Police killing an unarmed Black man in broad daylight while trying to conduct a warrantless arrest; a prosecutor indicting a 14-year-old Black boy on capital charges for raping a white girl with whom he was in a consensual relationship; a Black man given a death sentence despite the case’s star witness saying it was a white man who had assaulted her, an allegation the prosecutor failed to tell the defense or the jury.

Then there was Terence Garner , a teenager convicted of robbing and attempting to kill a white woman by a Johnston County jury in 1998. A Black eyewitness had told investigators Garner hadn’t been one of the three robbers. Two days after Garner’s conviction, someone else confessed to the crimes.

It still took another four years before Garner got out of prison.

“When I think about the Terrence Garner incident, I feel like, unfortunately, our prosecutors said ‘Any black person would do,'” Sanders said. “They got a conviction, they convicted a black man, case closed.”

That comment drew an objection from Jonathan P. Babb, special deputy attorney general with the North Carolina Department of Justice. Babb said Garner’s prosecutor helped get the conviction overturned.

“I don’t think that’s a fair characterization,” Babb said.

Later, when questioning Sanders, attorneys with the state presented evidence showing that the district attorney who prosecuted Garner publicly stated that it wasn’t justice to imprison an innocent person. They also noted that that same D.A. who tried Garner had hired the first Black assistant district attorney in Johnston County.

The hearing continues Tuesday morning at 9:30.