News Roundup

After a two-week evidentiary hearing last February, and closing arguments delivered in August, Superior Court Judge Wayland Sermons Jr. issued a 120-page order concluding that racism significantly affected the 2009 Johnston County trial of Hasson Bacote that resulted in the imposition of the death penalty. Bacote first challenged his sentence fifteen years ago under the now-repealed Racial Justice Act. In his order, Judge Sermons stated that the evidence showed a “consistent picture of the role race has played in jury selection throughout Johnston County and Prosecutorial District 11, and in the capital cases tried by [the] prosecutor…” After Governor Cooper commuted Bacote’s sentence to life imprisonment last December, it was unclear what would happen with the pending litigation. Judge Sermons evidently concluded that it was appropriate to make a ruling, stating that the voluminous “statistical, cultural, historical, social science, and other evidence produced in the [Bacote] case” would serve as a guide to courts considering the particular facts of future cases. Attorneys for the State said they planned to appeal the ruling. Read on for more criminal law news. AI-generated sexual images. 28 women, all students at North Carolina State University, reported that photos of their likeness have been used without their consent to generate sexual images posted to a website on which users share pornographic materials. It appears that the students’ faces were artificially superimposed over videos of nude women engaged in sexual acts. Authorities obtained a search warrant to gather information associated with the account on which the images [...]