Students for Justice in Palestine files civil rights complaint against UNC-Chapel Hill

BY: JOE KILLIAN 

UNC-Chapel Hill is facing a federal complaint filed on behalf of students and faculty members who say the university has systematically discriminated against Palestinian students and their allies in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Palestine Legal filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice April 5, on behalf of graduate student Kylie Broderick and professor Elyse Crystall, a member and faculty advisor to Students for Justice in Palestine respectively. In a letter and 95-page collection of exhibits, the group outlines what it says is preferential treatment of Israeli students and their allies and targeting of pro-Palestine students and groups from the attack late last year, through campus protests around the conflict and continuing to the current day.

The group is asking for an investigation into discrimination that may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The complaint is one of a number of such complaints Palestine Legal has filed on behalf of students and faculty involved in protests revolving around the most recent Hamas-Israel conflict. In the last few months the group has taken action against Emory University in Georgia, Columbia University in New York and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

In the complaint against UNC-Chapel Hill, the group said the discriminatory treatment began shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack.

“On October 10, 2023, the Dean of Students’ office sent an email to all current and former students whose birthplaces were listed ‘in or around Israel’ in UNC records to extend support and resources—including mental health counseling and academic accommodation,” wrote Zoha Khalili, senior staff attorney with Palestine Legal, in the letter. “According to students we have spoken with, several Palestinian students received this message because their birthplace was listed as Israel. No other Palestinian students reported receiving this message.

On October 12 and 13, the group wrote, then-Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Chief Diversity Officer Leah Cox met with members of North Carolina Hillel for two hours. They then sent follow-up letters to the campus saying “senseless acts of terror in Israel by Hamas are horrifying.”

University administration sent no similar messages acknowledging “the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by the Israeli government,” the letter said. Similarly, the group said, the administration said there is “no place for antisemitism or prejudice on our campus” without similarly condemning racism against Muslims, which was also on display as the conflict took shape or offering the same support and resources to Palestinian students who were impacted.

“By reducing the issue to one that affects students based on their religious identities, the chancellor omitted the ways national origin also shapes how people, particularly Palestinians, are affected by the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, irrespective of their religious affiliation or lack thereof,” the group wrote in its complaint.

In a written statement to Newsline Tuesday, a UNC-Chapel Hill spokesman said the university “has not been notified by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) about a complaint filed by or on behalf of Palestinian students.”

“We will cooperate fully with any requests for information from OCR,” the statement read. “And remain committed to promoting a safe and equitable environment to all members of the Carolina community that is free from harassment and discrimination.”

Objections to comments by UNC-Chapel Hill trustee 

The eight-page complaint also alleges the university has ignored bullying and harassment of Muslim and Palestinian students and those protesting against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and attacks on Gaza.

University leaders and members of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees mischaracterized on-campus protests on the issue, the complaint alleges, singling out UNC-Chapel Hill Trustee Marty Kotis specifically.

Kotis, like all members of the board of trustees, are political appointees of the North Carolina General Assembly’s Republican majority. He is also a former member of the UNC System Board of Trustees, whose members are overwhelmingly conservative.

“Kotis said in an October 12 email referencing the campus rally for Palestine that had been held that day that ‘it’s been reported that some of the speeches today were given in Arabic and the need [sic] to translate those to ensure there were not calls for or threats of violence,'” the group wrote in its complaint.

 Marty Kotis, member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.

The group cites similar emails expressing concern about the use of Arabic from Frederick E. Seller, vice president for Safety & Emergency Operations for the UNC System and former State Rep. Jon Hardister.

“The baseless association of the Arabic language with threats reflects longstanding anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes,” the group wrote in its complaint.

References to needing a “threat assessment” were particularly disturbing because students involved in the protest movement had reported receiving their own harassment and death threats online, the complaint reads.

Shortly after the cited email, Kotis called for the university to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine, to end any official university recognition and funding of the student group.

Speaking to Newsline Tuesday, Kotis reiterated his stance, citing the fact that the group recently disrupted a board of trustees meeting. Kotis said he wasn’t surprised to find himself cited in the group’s complaint.

“If I’m at odds with people who call America a colonizer nation or call for death to America, great,” Kotis said. “I’m happy to be at odds with a group that wants to wage a global intifada on American soil because I’m completely opposed to their ideology.”

This article originally appeared in the NC Newsline on April 10th, 2024.

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Death penalty on trial as Racial Justice Act hearing begins

By Kelan Lyons

In 1968, days after the Ku Klux Klan marched through Black neighborhoods in Benson following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., five young Black adolescents tried to burn down the Klan’s meeting hall in the Johnston County town. The fire did not travel past the doorway. The boys, all of whom were between the ages of 16 and 20 and did not have criminal records, were each given 12 years of imprisonment and hard labor, harsher than the sentences meted out to white defendants who were found guilty of similar crimes in the county.

North Carolina AG’s office pushes for delay in key Racial Justice Act hearing

Johnston County prosecutor once compared Black defendants to wild dogs and hyenas, hunting their victims “like the predators of the African plain”

A hearing scheduled for later this month could clear a path for the 136 people on North Carolina’s death row to one day get resentenced to life without the possibility of parole — or bring them one step closer to the execution chamber.

Beginning Feb. 26, attorneys are scheduled to present evidence to a Johnston County Superior Court judge arguing that race significantly affected prosecutors’ actions during jury selection, not just in the underlying case of Hasson Bacote, but in capital cases throughout North Carolina. 

But if the state attorney general’s office gets its way, these findings will not be heard in court — at least not this month.

“Racial discrimination in jury selection is abhorrent in all respects and has no place in the criminal justice system,” reads a recent court filing signed by lawyers in the attorney general’s office, including the Attorney General himself, Josh Stein, a Democrat who is running for governor this year. “Nevertheless, like all claims, a claim of racial discrimination cannot be presumed based on the mere assertion of a defendant; it must be proved.”

According to a recent court filing, the evidence to be submitted by Bacote’s lawyers includes several findings:

• In 176 capital cases across North Carolina between 1985 and 2011, Black people were two and a half times more likely to be struck from jury pools than other jurors.
• Similarly, in seven Johnston County capital cases over that same timeframe, Black people were four times more likely to be struck from the jury pool than other jurors.
• In four capital cases in that timeframe tried by Gregory Butler, an assistant district attorney, Black people were 10 times more likely to be struck from a jury pool than other jurors. Butler also prosecuted Bacote, the defendant in the underlying case.

The attorney general’s office, however, called the evidence “insufficiently supported.” It took issue with a study conducted by law professors at Michigan State University, arguing that the state Supreme Court has already deemed that research irrelevant and misleading.

Last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that a study by the same MSU professors was “unreliable and fatally flawed” because it “assumed racial animus in cases in which defendants did not make any such claim, or in which the trial court or appellate courts did not make or sustain any such findings.”

In light of that opinion, the AG’s office asked the trial court judge to deny Bacote’s jury selection claims without holding a hearing. The judge denied the request.

The attorney general’s office is now seeking a second opinion. It has petitioned the state Supreme Court for guidance on how lower courts should use the MSU study in assessing claims of juror discrimination. This decision could drastically impact pending RJA claims, since they rely on the MSU study to support juror discrimination arguments.

Attorney Shelagh Rebecca Kenney, one of the attorneys representing Bacote, filed a motion last week criticizing the AG’s office for trying to derail the pending hearing: “The State appears motivated by its knowledge of the strength of Defendant’s evidence, its reluctance to face that evidence in open court, and its fear of losing.”

The Racial Justice Act’s lead case

Hasson Bacote, who is Black, was sentenced to death in Johnston County in 2009 for a crime he committed when he was 20 years old.

Ten white and two Black jurors convicted Bacote of killing Anthony Surles during a robbery. According to attorney Kenney’s motion, Bacote is one of 11 men sentenced to death in North Carolina after being convicted of first-degree murder solely under the theory of felony murder; that means the killing was not premeditated or deliberate, and instead happened during the commission of another violent felony.

All 11 of those men are people of color.

The core of Bacote’s case is the Racial Justice Act, a landmark law passed by Democrats in 2009, repealed by Republicans in 2013, and preserved by the Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court in 2020. The law gives people on North Carolina’s death row an opportunity to be resentenced to life in prison without parole if they can prove racial discrimination played a role in their death sentence.

The hearing would be the first since 2020, when the Supreme Court ruled that all claims brought under the RJA were still valid and could have their day in court.

Lawyers for the state started sharing discovery with Bacote’s team in 2022, after a Superior Court judge ordered them to turn over data on how prosecutors across North Carolina pick juries in capital cases. Over the past few years, the state has turned over 680,000 pages of discovery, which Kenney called in her motion “the most comprehensive discovery provided by the state on jury selection issues in North Carolina.”

Bacote’s is the RJA’s lead case, which means it will set the standard for how other cases are handled. How the Supreme Court handles the attorney general’s request — or a later appeal — will affect how judges deal with future Racial Justice Act claims.

Lawyers with the Attorney General’s office wrote to the state Supreme Court noting that if the hearing takes place on Feb. 26 as scheduled, it would “waste time and resources if it is later determined on subsequent appeal that the claims should have been dismissed at the pleadings stage.”

Kenney, meanwhile, rebutted that claim. She argued the research referenced by the attorney general’s office dealt with a 2011 MSU study; that data was updated for Bacote’s case, using information gleaned from the hundreds of thousands of documents turned over by the state. That data, she continued, hasn’t ever been presented or considered by any court.

She also contested the relevance of the state Supreme Court ruling referenced by the state, since that ruling explicitly said it did not address the defendant’s RJA claim.

The MSU study is also not the only evidence Bacote’s lawyers plan to use to make their case. Included within those 680,000 documents were prosecutors’ handwritten notes, which Kenney wrote in the motion “reveal that race permeated the State’s approach to jury selection.”

Prosecutors’ notes from various trials show a preoccupation with prospective jurors’ race. In one Washington County case, for instance, a prosecutor wrote that they didn’t want a particular person on the jury out of concern she would be “sympathetic to plight” and that she “had a child by BM [Black Man].” In that same case, a prosecutor scribbled that they wanted one juror who seemed favorable to prosecution, noting she seemed like she would “bring her own rope.”

Race didn’t just figure into jury selection, but into the prosecutor’s racist views as well. Kenney’s motion includes a newspaper article from another of Butler’s capital cases where he compared the Black defendants to wild dogs and hyenas, hunting their victims “like the predators of the African plain.”

The Supreme Court could issue a ruling on the attorney general’s petition as early as the end of this week.

This article originally appeared in NC Newsline on February 7th, 2023. 

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