Roy Cooper’s Last Stand on the Death Penalty

Update: Gov. Roy Cooper said on Tuesday, December 31 that he was commuting the sentences of 15 people on death row to life without the possibility of parole. Among them was Hasson Bacote, who The Assembly wrote had sought to have his sentence commuted under the Racial Justice Act.

On October 12, 2017, four inmates attempting to escape the Pasquotank Correctional Institute allegedly killed three correctional officers and a prison manager. Two months later, the county district attorney announced he would seek the most severe punishment—the death penalty. 

But the likelihood of any of them being subject to capital punishment in the near future is low. (Two have been convicted and sentenced to death; the other two men’s trials are still pending.) North Carolina has not carried out an execution since 2006. 

Republican state Senate Leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore have blamed the state’s top Democrats for blocking the path to more executions.

“For over a decade, death penalty opponents like [Governor] Roy Cooper and [Attorney General] Josh Stein have imposed a de-facto moratorium on capital punishment in North Carolina, using every legal trick possible—including inaction—to delay death sentences handed down by juries and deny justice to victims,” Berger said after the Pasquotank deaths. 

But neither Cooper nor Stein opposes the death penalty, and Cooper oversaw 27 executions as attorney general. 

Over the last eight years in the governor’s mansion, Cooper has been tight-lipped about the issue. And he has had no reason to say much, with the death penalty caught up in litigation, most recently over the Racial Justice Act, which allowed death-row inmates to possibly get their sentences reduced to life if they could prove race played a significant role in their case.  

The North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and other advocates have spent the last two years campaigning for Cooper to issue a mass commutation of sentences for all 136 death-row inmates, the fifth-largest in the country. It would  be a bold move, but not unprecedented—Oregon Gov. Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of 17 people before she left office in 2022. 

The coalition has held rallies, met with the governor’s staff and sent letters. In September, two dozen people gathered outside the Forsyth County courthouse to launch a 136-mile walk through the state, noting that Forsyth had more death-row inmates than any other county at 12.  

Noel Nickle, the coalition’s executive director, and Andre Smith, whose son, Daniel, was murdered in 2007, hand-delivered a petition signed by more than 5,000 people to Cooper’s office on December 10. The day marked two years since the coalition started its commutation campaign. 

In North Carolina, 12 people have been exonerated after spending years on death row; 11 of them are non-white. 

Twenty-seven states still have the death penalty on the books; Democratic governors run six of them. But Cooper stands out as the only one of that group who has not said or done anything publicly on the issue.  

Cooper’s office had little comment on what he might decide to do in his final weeks in office. “State and federal courts have issued orders that stopped all executions from going forward in North Carolina and the governor has complied with those judicial orders,” a spokesman said in a statement to The Assembly. “The Office of the Governor, including the offices of Executive Clemency and General Counsel, closely review all petitions for clemency, including those seeking commutations of death sentences.”

He noted that Cooper has issued 20 commutations and 23 pardons as governor. 

In a recent interview, Cooper told The Assembly that the death penalty is “appropriate in certain heinous cases,” but that he wants to make sure it is not applied arbitrarily. 

“Having capital punishment in place, you must do everything you can to make sure it is as fair as possible,” Cooper said. That includes supporting the Racial Justice Act, he said, which Republicans repealed in 2013. 

Nickle believes Cooper is taking the coalition’s request seriously. “We don’t need the death penalty and I think he understands that,” she said. 

‘A Top Death-Penalty State’

The most recent capital murder trial of the year ended on November 7 in Alamance County. In the end, a jury recommended that Hyquan Johan Parker receive three separate sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

Alamance County prosecutors alleged that Parker, 31, of Durham, had fatally shot three people in a Burlington apartment in June 2019. This was only the second capital murder trial in the county in a decade, and the previous trial involving a man accused of murdering his stepmother also ended with the jury recommending a life sentence. 

This year, prosecutors across the state tried three capital murder cases—Parker in Alamance, Mario Bennett in Forsyth County, and Brandon Hill in Wake County. Juries recommended life sentences in all three, meaning North Carolina will end the year without adding any new inmates to death row. (Hill’s co-defendant, Seaga Gillard, received the death penalty in 2019; the state Supreme Court upheld the sentence in a decision issued December 13.)

In six out of the past 14 years, North Carolina has had zero death sentences. By comparison, North Carolina added 34 new death sentences in 1995. Between 1977 and 2006, North Carolina sentenced 436 people to death and carried out 43 executions, according to a 2021 report by Matthew Robinson, a political science professor at Appalachian State University. 

“Historically, we’ve been a top death-penalty state,” he said. “We are top 10 in the size of our death row. We were top 10 in the number of death sentences. We were top 10 in the number of executions per year.” (North Carolina is the ninth largest state by population).

Before 2001, prosecutors had little discretion on the death penalty, said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who has done extensive research on capital punishment. In 2001, state legislators passed a bill that expanded prosecutors’ discretion on when to use the death penalty and another bill that established the Indigent Defense Services, Baumgartner said. Both became law. Those reforms required courts to provide two lawyers trained in capital defense work to be assigned any defendant facing the death penalty. 

As a result of those reforms, prosecutors are pursuing the death penalty less, resulting in fewer death sentences overall. When prosecutors take a case to trial, jurors are more likely to come back with a recommendation for life. In a partial dissent in the Gillard case decided December 13, Justice Anita Earls pointed out that Wake County jurors chose life in nine separate capital murder cases, including ones with egregious facts. 

But even as the state has been less inclined to subject people to the death penalty, prosecutors still see it as a necessary tool. Sometimes, prosecutors use the death penalty as leverage for a plea deal — first-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence or a lesser murder charge. And prosecutors have been accused of threatening the death penalty in cases where charges were either dropped or defendants were later acquitted at trial. They also continue to use a jury-selection practice called “death qualification,” which allows them to remove potential jurors who are skeptical of the death penalty from the pool.

Two years ago, the ACLU filed a 300-page motion challenging the practice and alleging that it discriminates against Black people, women, and Catholics, all groups that tend to oppose the death penalty. A study the ACLU included showed that even with death qualification, 10 of the 11 Wake County juries in the study chose to impose life sentences. 

The motion was filed as part of the case against Hill, the defendant in one of the three capital murder trials this year. The judge denied the ACLU’s motion, but the jury ultimately recommended that Hill receive a life sentence. 

Kimberly Spahos, executive director for the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, said in an email that prosecutors make decisions about the death penalty “on a case-by-case basis, carefully considering the unique facts and circumstances of each case, as well as the applicable law.”

“These decisions are guided by the pursuit of justice and the specific statutory requirements set forth by the General Assembly,” she said. 

Robinson, the Appalachian State professor, said North Carolina is odd. Many states either have a moratorium or have repealed the death penalty. North Carolina has done neither. 

“We have the death penalty, we still sentence people to death but we just don’t use it,” Robinson said. “It’s a pretty silly position to be in.”

Political Equilibrium 

That’s a position North Carolina leaders seem content to stay in. No one has filed a bill in recent years to restart the death penalty, and bills to repeal it have failed. 

Former state Rep. Jon Hardister tried to get his fellow Republicans to repeal the death penalty in 2015. He spoke at a news conference organized by N.C. Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty at the time, joined by Nebraska state Sen. Colby Coash, who had successfully lobbied his state to abolish the death penalty. 

That same year, state legislators passed the Restoring Proper Justice Act to remove barriers to restarting the death penalty, including removing requirements that only a licensed physician could oversee executions and exempting information about drugs used in lethal injection from the state’s public-records laws. But the death chamber remained closed for business due to continued litigation. 

Last year, four Democrats filed a bill to repeal the death penalty, arguing that about 54 percent of the 136 inmates on death row are Black, and the state spends $11 million a year to maintain the capital punishment system. The bill never made it to the floor for a vote. 

Rep. Marcia Morey, who represents Durham and is a former district court judge, was one of the sponsors. “It’s an important conversation but right now, it doesn’t seem that the political winds are there,” she said. 

North Carolina seems to have reached a political equilibrium on the topic, Robinson said.

“Conservative Republicans are happy because we have the death penalty [and] we’re still sentencing people to death,” he said. “Liberal Democrats are happy because we have the death penalty but we’re not using it. It’s sort of a nice middle ground to be in because everyone wins.” 

Republican leaders have not said whether an effort to restart the death penalty will come up next year. Berger didn’t respond to several requests for comment. Neither did state Rep. Destin Hall, who is expected to become the next House Speaker. 

This leaves the state in a bit of a holding pattern. Many criminal justice reform advocates are watching the case of Hassan Bacote, a Johnston County death-row inmate challenging his sentence under the Racial Justice Act. Bacote’s lawyers secured an evidentiary hearing earlier this year, the first in more than a decade under the act. The first evidentiary hearings were held in 2012 in Cumberland County and four death-row inmates had their sentences reduced to life in prison without parole. Litigation ensued, and Republican lawmakers sought to narrow the law’s scope and then ultimately repeal it. 

However, defendants in two Iredell County death penalty cases went to the state Supreme Court, arguing that the law’s repeal doesn’t keep their pending claims from being heard. In 2020, the court agreed, paving the way for more than 100 pending Racial Justice Act claims to go forward and leading to Bacote’s evidentiary hearing. 

At the hearing, Bacote’s lawyers centered their case on 680,000 documents that included jury selection notes. They also claimed that Assistant District Attorney Gregory Butler, who prosecuted Bacote, had used racist language to describe Black defendants. 

Whatever Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr. decides in Bacote’s case will determine how the other remaining Racial Justice Act claims play out, and effectively whether the state will kill the death penalty or resurrect it. Sermons won’t issue a ruling until next year, and his decision will likely end up at the state Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority. 

The possibility that the death penalty could be restarted has many looking to Gov. Cooper to intervene. They see some evidence that Cooper’s support for the death penalty has softened.

Cooper established the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice in June 2020, at the height of national protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and Armaud Arbery. Stein co-chaired the task force, which issued a report noting the close relationship between the death penalty with white supremacy and the lynching of Black people. Cooper also formed the Juvenile Sentence Review Board, acknowledging racial and other disparities that result in teenagers receiving harsh prison sentences. 

While Cooper is leaving the governor’s office after two terms, that doesn’t mean political calculations aren’t a factor. He’s reportedly considering challenging U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in 2026.

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that in modern history, governors in at least six states have given categorical commutations for every death-row inmate. Just like other states, the majority of North Carolina’s death-row inmates were convicted way before major reforms were implemented. That means, Maher said, some death-row inmates were either wrongfully convicted or denied due process. 

“We have people on death row that shouldn’t be there,” she said. 

Wrongfully Convicted

Glen Edward Chapman used to be one of those people. Sixteen years ago, he left death-row an exonerated man, after a judge determined he had been wrongfully convicted in the 1992 murders of two Hickory women. But the scars of those death-row years remain.

Chapman, 57, is solidly-built with a wide smile as he greeted a visitor to his small apartment in a duplex with bright-green siding on the outskirts of downtown Durham. Jubilee Home, a faith-based organization that helps people released from prison, owns the duplex. His apartment is sparse, with a dark-gray couch on a wall near the entrance and a brown recliner chair in front of the flat-screen television. He showed a 30-minute video that was made to bolster his request for a pardon of innocence.

He sat at a table, his hand on his chin, occasionally wiping away tears as the video played. He has watched the video before and he sometimes has to walk away. The long road from death row to freedom was far from smooth; it almost broke him and the emotional bruises haven’t healed all the way yet. 

A jury convicted Chapman of first-degree murder in the deaths of Tenene Yvette Conley and Betty Jean Ramseur, and he was sentenced to death. Chapman said he didn’t know North Carolina had a death row until he was sent there. He told everyone he could that he was innocent; no one listened, he said. 

“I literally thought I was going to die,” he said. 

For the first three years, he said he just cried. His post-conviction attorneys, however, found that prosecutors had withheld favorable evidence, including that another man had confessed to killing Ramseur and that Conley might not have been murdered at all. A judge in 2007 overturned Chapman’s conviction and granted him a new trial. The district attorney dismissed the charges and on April 2, 2008, Chapman walked out of prison. 

Chapman has since battled alcohol and drug addiction, and he has worked hard to maintain his mental and physical health. He moved back to North Carolina two years ago after living in Florida. He said he is trying to rebuild his life. 

Chapman is still waiting on a governor to grant a pardon petition that he filed in 2011 when Bev Perdue was governor. She never granted it. Neither did Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. And he is now waiting on Cooper to make a decision before he leaves office. 

“I can’t get none of that time back,” he said. “None of that. The only thing I can do is try each day to be better than the day before.” 

Chapman is one of a dozen North Carolinians exonerated after spending time on death row. While he was there, North Carolina executed 37 people. 

He is grateful that the state hasn’t put anyone to death since 2006, but he wonders if Cooper is willing to do more. 

“Do away with it,” he said. “If you’re going to take North Carolina somewhere, take them to a new chapter.” 

Jeffrey Billman contributed to this report. 

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.