The governor of North Carolina has granted commutations to 15 people on death row on his final day in office, changing their sentences to life without the possibility of parole.
Roy Cooper, a Democrat, announced his clemency action on New Year’s Eve, prompting praise from opponents of capital punishment, who have advocated for mass commutations to thwart executions.
Cooper’s grants exclude dozens of people whose death sentences remain intact. Out of 136 people on the state’s death row, Cooper had received 89 clemency petitions, according to the governor’s office. His office said it considered the facts of the crime, input from prosecutors and victims, “credible claims of innocence”, the “potential influence of race”, prison conduct, a defendant’s age and intellectual capacity at the time of the offense and other case factors.
“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,” Cooper said in a statement.
His action comes after Joe Biden, in his final weeks in office, commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 people on federal death row, shielding them from execution under Donald Trump.
Related: Trump tells 37 people on death row with commuted sentences to ‘go to hell’
The American Civil Liberties Union celebrated the clemency grant to Hasson Bacote, a Black man sentenced to death in 2009. Bacote brought a lead case challenging the death penalty under the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA). That legislation, passed in 2009, allowed challenges to death sentences if defendants could show race played a role at trial. Lawmakers repealed the RJA in 2013, but courts ruled that people with pending claims were entitled to hearings, the ACLU explained in a statement on Tuesday.
In Bacote’s hearings, historians, statisticians and other experts outlined prosecutors’ discrimination against Black defendants in jury selection across North Carolina, the ACLU said.
“Mr Bacote brought forth unequivocal evidence, unlike any that’s ever been presented in a North Carolina courtroom, that the death penalty is racist,” said Shelagh Kenney, deputy director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which represented him alongside the ACLU and Legal Defense Fund. “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.”
A judge has not yet ruled in Bacote’s RJA case. The decision, the ACLU said, could have implications for everyone with death sentences in North Carolina.
Others commuted by Cooper include Guy LeGrande, whose lawyers have said he was mentally ill and who had a scheduled execution date in 2006 before a judge intervened, the AP reported. Another is Christopher Roseboro, convicted of murder and rape in 1992, who has an intellectual disability and suffered from ineffective trial counsel, according to his attorneys.
North Carolina, which as the fifth largest death row in the US, has not carried out any executions since 2006 due to ongoing litigation, the governor’s office said.
Related: Spate of high-profile US death penalty cases fuels public outrage and anger
A total of 27 states continue to have capital punishment on the books, though executions are on hold in five of them.
Cooper’s clemency action is the largest of its kind in the state. Previously, governors commuted five death sentences in the modern death penalty era, according to the NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
“This action is smaller than we asked for, but it is still a historic step by a North Carolina governor to address injustice in the death penalty. The 15 men granted clemency today include people affected by racism in their trials, people who were sentenced under outdated laws, and those who committed crimes at very young ages, among other inequities,” said Noel Nickle, the coalition’s executive director, in a statement.
Fourteen of the commutations were people of color, and 12 were tried before 2001 reforms implemented to prevent wrongful convictions, the group said.
The announcement comes at the end of a year that saw a spate of executions across the US that sparked significant outrage, including cases involving defendants with credible innocence claims.
