If Tuesday’s election revealed anything about our country, it’s that we are deeply divided. However, Americans do seem to broadly agree that veterans should be revered for their service.

As we celebrate Veterans Day, we want to remind you that veterans make up about 10 percent of death row prisoners in the United States. In North Carolina, 15 percent of the 136 people on death row served in the military. In many cases, the legal system failed to give meaningful consideration to their service, despite research showing that overwhelming numbers of veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress.

While not every veteran sees combat, some of those on North Carolina’s death row experienced the horrors of war. After returning home, they were offered little support for dealing with their invisible wounds. In some cases, there is a direct line between the trauma they suffered and the crimes that led to their death sentences.

Warren Gregory has been on death row since 1993. He served in the first Gulf War, where his unit saw frequent combat. They endured oil fires, missile attacks, and artillery fire. Mr. Gregory received at least six decorations for his service including the Combat Action Ribbon and a Good Conduct Medal. Yet, when his service was complete, he received no screening for combat trauma. In the civilian world, he swiftly deteriorated. He began staying up all night to avoid nightmares. He turned to drinking and drugs and soon lost touch with reality. All were well documented signs of post-traumatic stress which, left untreated, led to violence.

In 1996, James Davis was sent to death row after committing a workplace murder while in the throes of psychosis. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War who survived two brutal combat tours and a shrapnel injury. After his time in the jungles of Vietnam, his combat experiences, combined with a history of severe childhood abuse, touched off severe mental illness. By the time of the crime, he was hearing voices and hallucinating. At his trial, he was so heavily medicated that his speech was slurred and he could not hold a coherent conversation.

Tragically, the jury that sentenced him to death never got to decide whether his combat trauma merited mercy. They heard almost nothing about his military service or his mental illness. In 2009, in a ceremony on death row, Mr. Davis received a long overdue  Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam.

As you honor veterans today, please take a moment to remember people like James Davis and Warren Gregory, who sacrificed their mental health for their country. Surely, veterans should be worthy of our mercy and compassion, rather than being subjected to our society’s harshest and most extreme punishment. 

What drew you to work with incarcerated people?

My first year of college at UNC-Chapel Hill, our assigned summer reading was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Stevenson when he came to our school and spoke about his work, and he signed my book. The book is about mass incarceration and the death penalty, and how people of color are treated in the system. In the book, Mr. Stevenson also talks about the importance of getting proximate to people who are directly impacted. That’s what led me to volunteer with kids at a juvenile detention center. That’s where I decided I wanted to be an advocate.

I quickly realized that a juvenile detention center is nothing more than a children’s jail. The kids there were locked in, separated from their families, and treated like they should be feared instead of cared for. Rarely did we see white children and almost all of the kids there were Black boys. These were boys who had been let down by the school system, lived in poverty, and had family and friends who’d been shot and killed or died of drug overdoses.

When I first started volunteering, I was 18, so I was close in age to many of the kids there. I realized that if my life had taken a different direction, or if I hadn’t had a supportive family, I could’ve been right where they were. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to become a defense attorney and help tell the stories of people who had been pushed away from society. From undergrad, I went straight to Duke Law so I could become a criminal defense attorney.

Why do you want to represent people who are guilty and have committed crimes as serious as murder?

You’re right that CDPL is not an innocence project. We represent people on death row and while some of our clients are innocent, we also represent people who are, in fact, guilty. For me, the way we treat people who have caused great harm is a deeply moral issue. As Bryan Stevenson says, we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, and if that is true, then we have to treat all people with dignity and respect no matter what they’ve done. We have to treat them with empathy and compassion. The death penalty is the exact opposite of that.

It’s also true that our society does not punish everyone who has caused great harm the same way. A lot of times, we punish people differently based on the color of their skin. As a society, we are much more likely to decide that a person of color, especially a Black man, is irredeemable. I completely disagree with the idea that some people are irredeemable and some people aren’t.

What’s the most challenging part of being a capital defense attorney?

As a criminal defense attorney, you’re always going to be the underdog. When going into a courtroom, you’re taking on the challenge of not just arguing a legal claim, but arguing for your client’s humanity. It can be challenging when people are sometimes so blinded by their preconceived notions that it’s impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that your client isn’t a monster. For me, it’s been disappointing to see people who claim they care about justice, but their justice has no space for people of color who have been accused of crimes. It has no space for people who struggle with poverty, who have mental illness, who have been let down by the system.

What would you like people to know about your clients?

They are some of the kindest, funniest, most loving, thoughtful people. Some of their stories are so harrowing to hear, the poverty and abuse they’ve lived through, the addiction. But then I see how different they are today, and I enjoy being with them. If more people could meet them, they would see what I see. These are not people who deserve to be executed.

Of the work you’ve done so far, what are you most proud of?

In 2024, I was counsel on the historic Racial Justice Act case, which discussed the racism in the capital punishment system. I was proud to be part of the team of attorneys representing Mr. Hasson Bacote in such a landmark case. Bryan Stevenson was our expert witness, and I went down to his nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, to help prepare him for his testimony. It was such a full circle moment for me to work with someone who had inspired me to go to law school. I’m going to cherish that for the rest of my life.

At CDPL, we believe that the past informs the present. That’s why we took on our ambitious Racist Roots project in 2020. It’s also the reason that we are now a sponsor of the Booker T. Spicely Committee.

You might have heard of the committee at the end of last year, when it successfully lobbied for a historic marker in recognition of Pfc. Spicely, a Black soldier who was shot to death by a Durham bus driver in 1944 because he resisted giving up his seat to a group of white soldiers.

In addition to shining light on a forgotten hero, the marker is also the first in NC to use the phrase “Jim Crow.” We hope it will not be the last, considering how fundamental Jim Crow was to North Carolina’s history and politics – as well as its death penalty.

On July 8, 1944, Pfc. Spicely was on his way to Camp Butner for Army training. Wearing his uniform, he was sitting in the next to last row when a group of white soldiers got on the bus and the driver told him to move to the last row. This was years before Rosa Parks’ protest that set off a bus boycott, but Spicely was part of a national civil rights movement called the Double V campaign, which encouraged soldiers to protest segregation and fight for democracy both at home and abroad.

Spicely protested that he was “just as good to stop a bullet” as a white soldier and then said, “I thought I was fighting this war for democracy.” Spicely ultimately changed seats, but when he got off the bus in Durham, the bus driver shot him twice in the chest with many witnesses watching. One bullet went through his dog tags. Spicely died from his injuries after being refused treatment at the whites-only Watts Hospital. By the time he made it to Duke Hospital, which treated Black people, it was too late to save him.

CDPL’s Of Counsel Attorney James Williams, who leads the Spicely Committee, summed it up eloquently: “Here’s this soldier in uniform who’s supporting this country’s war efforts, and he asks these reasonable and sensible questions. Am I not wearing the same uniform as those white soldiers? Do I not run the risk of stopping a bullet just like those white soldiers? Why are you treating us like this?”

The injustice was compounded when the bus driver went to trial for Spicely’s killing. An all-white jury deliberated just 28 minutes before acquitting him – a good reminder of why CDPL continues to fight against the exclusion of Black and Brown people from capital juries.

In addition to the marker, the committee helped to establish an annual scholarship in Pfc. Spicely’s name at NC Central University. It will also mark the 80th anniversary of Spicely’s death by presenting a one-act play about his life. CDPL will continue to stand behind the committee’s efforts to remember and right the injustices of the past.

Landmark Racial Justice Act hearing could affect more than 100 people on NC’s death row

Hasson Bacote was sentenced to death in a Johnston County courtroom in April 2009. As a Black man in a deeply segregated county with a history of racial terror, Bacote’s fate was all but sealed well before the jury issued his death sentence. Under our current death penalty statute, every one of the eight Black capital defendants who have faced Johnston County juries has received a death sentence. Bacote was no exception. Now, his case is moving forward under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), which allows capital defendants to challenge their death sentences on the basis that race was a significant factor in decisions to seek or impose the death penalty. A hearing will begin Feb. 26 in Johnston County Superior Court and force those watching to grapple with the stark reality that race plays an outsized role in the administration of the death penalty.

Bacote’s will be the first RJA case heard since 2020, when the N.C. Supreme Court ruled that, despite the Act’s 2013 repeal, all claims brought under the RJA remain valid. His case will decide key questions about the scope and application of the Act and pave the way for others on North Carolina’s death row. Bacote will be the first defendant to present a trove of social science and historical evidence linking the death sentences of Black men to a pattern of racial terror and intimidation.  Bacote will also present powerful statistical evidence of discrimination in the death penalty.

Bacote was just 21 when he was charged with the crime that led to his death sentence, the shooting of 18-year-old Anthony Surles during a robbery. The crime was the culmination of a childhood marked by poverty, trauma, and neglect. After surviving a traumatic birth and prolonged hospital stay as a newborn, Bacote was abandoned by his parents at an early age. At seven years old, after witnessing his maternal aunt die, Bacote entered foster care where he was subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Later, he was separated from his older brother, the only stable figure in his life. All of these are reasons why juries often choose life over death. But in the rural eastern North Carolina courtroom where the judge and every lawyer was white — and where the prosecutor struck qualified Black jurors at three times the rate of whites, creating a heavily white jury from a diverse jury pool – Bacote received no mercy.

Nor did it matter that—as even the prosecution conceded—there was no evidence that the murder of Surles was premeditated or deliberate. The prosecution charged Bacote and a codefendant, Jeff Evans, with attempting to rob five young adults, including Surles, in a trailer. Witnesses testified that Anthony Surles fled the trailer during the robbery and Bacote fired a single shot in his direction. None of the witnesses nor Bacote realized Surles had been shot until they went outside and found him collapsed on the ground. Ten white and two Black jurors convicted Bacote of felony murder and sentenced him to death. Felony murder is a legal doctrine that holds defendants responsible for deaths that occur during the course of committing other violent felonies. In some states, felony murders are not eligible for the death penalty. Bacote is one of just 11 people sentenced to death in North Carolina for a crime that involved no planning or forethought. All 11 are men of color and one was Henry McCollum, who was exonerated after spending more than 30 years on death row. Bacote is the only person for whom the prosecution did not at least seek a conviction for something other than felony murder in a capital case. 

In February 2024, Bacote will present statistical evidence of racial disparities in the prosecutor’s use of peremptory strikes in capital cases in North Carolina and in Johnston County, as well as racial disparities in capital sentencing in Johnston County.  This type of proof – while key to rooting out racism in the criminal punishment system – is not typically considered in criminal cases. However, the 2009 RJA allowed people on death row to present evidence of systemic bias that infected their sentences. North Carolina’s RJA was the first statute of its kind to allow a person’s death sentence to be vacated without requiring proof of intentional discrimination. As a result of the law, studies uncovered statewide patterns of enormous racial disparities in jury selection and sentencing. Two prior RJA hearings were held under the statute in 2012, resulting in life sentences for four defendants based on the trial court’s finding of statewide discrimination. Those prior decisions were ultimately vacated, meaning that Bacote’s case could be the first RJA case with precedential effect.

Among those who will provide expert witness testimony is attorney Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL, who will attest to the history of racial discrimination in jury selection, as well as evidence of racial bias in Johnston County courtrooms and Bacote’s own case. Social psychologist Dr. Samuel Sommers will explain how implicit racial biases are measurable and affect everything from jury selection to jury deliberations.

Historical experts Dr. Crystal Sanders, a historian born and raised in Johnston County, and Dr. Seth Kotch will detail the racist history of Johnston County and North Carolina as a whole. Johnston County was the site of at least six lynchings between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of World War I. Through the 1970s, KKK billboards greeted drivers with messages like, “Welcome to Klan country. Love it or leave it.” In the 1980s, Smithfield police officers shot and killed a Black man after he called to report the theft of his family’s television. The officer who fired the shot went on to become a state capitol police officer and a Johnston County magistrate. Today, the county remains deeply segregated. Though Black residents make up 19 percent of the population, the county has never elected a Black sheriff, district attorney, or county commissioner. The current sheriff has publicly voiced anti-immigrant slurs and remained in office with no challengers. Recently, county commissioners withheld millions in funding from the public schools until they adopted a policy that teachers can be fired if they teach about systemic racism.

The ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund represents Bacote. Attorneys expect the hearing to last two to three weeks.