North Carolina has asked the state Supreme Court to review a trial court ruling finding racial bias tainted the jury selection at a Black man's capital murder trial, saying the man's case was rendered moot in December when the outgoing governor commuted his sentence, according to a petition filed Monday.

The state argued in the petition that North Carolina Superior Court Judge Wayland J. Sermons, Jr., erred in declining to dismiss as moot a motion the defendant, Hasson Jamaal Bacote, filed in 2010 to challenge his death sentence under the North Carolina's Racial Justice Act, or RJA, after Gov. Roy Cooper commuted the sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole on Dec 31.

Bacote's case could impact over 100 other people facing the death penalty in North Carolina who have pending RJA claims.

Attorneys with North Carolina's Justice Department told the state high court that the governor's act of clemency had already granted the only relief available to Bacote under the statute — life without parole — making the defendant's motion moot. In February, Judge Sermons rejected the mootness argument, holding that the governor's commutation did not negate the need to adjudicate systemic racial discrimination claims.

"The trial court erred by refusing to dismiss Defendant's moot claims and by instead issuing a 120-page opinion on the merits of those claims," the petition says.

A jury convicted Bacote of first-degree murder in April 2009 for killing Anthony Surles, and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

In 2010, while his appeal was pending in the state Supreme Court, Bacote filed a motion under RJA, which provided a pathway to people on death row to seek life without parole if they could prove that their cases were significantly sullied by racial prejudice. The law was repealed in 2013, but a subsequent North Carolina Supreme Court ruling clarified that courts were allowed to adjudicate claims that were already pending under it.

Bacote argued his prosecutors violated the law when they used peremptory strikes disproportionately against Black jurors.

On Feb 7, more than a month after Bacote's sentence had already been commuted, Judge Sermons vacated his death sentence and resentenced him to life without parole, citing significant statistical and anecdotal evidence of racial bias.

Judge Sermons gave particular weight to the testimony of Michigan State University College of Law Professor Barbara O'Brien, who found that Bacote's prosecutors struck Black jurors at 3.3 times the rate of others.

In addition, Bacote's lead prosecutor, Gregory C. Butler, had a documented history of racialized language against Black defendants, including Bacote, whom he called "a thug" — a term he conceded has racial connotations — and described as "cold-hearted and without remorse" in front of the jury.

In his order, Judge Sermons also pointed to evidence showing that, in Johnston County, from 1970 to 2011, Black defendants were more than twice as likely to receive a death sentence as whites, and that Black defendants had a 100% chance of receiving a death sentence when charged with felony murder. And rejecting the state's mootness argument, the judge opined that each motion filed under the RJA "should be handled separately, individually, and on the basis of their facts."

"A death sentence tainted by race ... harms defendants and impugns the legitimacy of the criminal punishment system as a whole," Judge Sermons said in the order.

North Carolina, which separately informed North Carolina's high court that it would appeal Judge Sermons' order under the state's procedural law, told the court on Monday that it was filing the certiorari petition "out of an abundance of caution" to ensure that the court would review the case.

"If this Court concludes the State lacks a statutory right to appeal or that the State's appeal is otherwise defective, it should exercise its discretionary authority to review the trial court's erroneous orders," the petition says.

Attorneys representing the state did not immediately reply to a request for comments. Bacote's attorney declined to comment.

The state is represented by Joan M. Cunningham, Jonathan Babb, M Ben Szany, Nicholaos Vlahos, and Heidi M. Williams of the North Carolina Department of Justice.

Bacote is represented by Jay H. Ferguson of Thomas Ferguson & Beskind LLP, Cassandra Stubbs and Henderson Hill of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Shelagh Kenney and Kailey Morgan of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.

The case is State of North Carolina v. Hasson Jamaal Bacote, case number 360A09-2, in the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

--Additional reporting by Hayley Fowler. Editing by Vaqas Asghar.