OAKLAND — In a ruling that calls into question numerous Alameda County death penalty convictions, a federal judge on Monday found “strong evidence” that prosecutors here made a conscious effort to keep people off of juries based on their race and religion.
The order by U.S. District Judge Vincent Chhabria suggests evidence that systemic racism and antisemitism was hiding in plain sight, within prosecution notes in the case file for a man named Ernest Dykes who was sentenced to death after a 1995 jury trial. It was only brought to Chhabria’s attention in 2023, by a county prosecutor assigned by Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price to review Dykes’ conviction.
“These notes — especially when considered in conjunction with evidence presented in other cases — constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases,” Chhabria wrote in his Monday ruling that lifts a protective order on the notes in question.
The finding could have broad and far-reaching implications — there are 35 death penalty convictions in Alameda County, most of which are decades old.
Price — who ran in 2022 on a platform that included pledging to root out “corruption” in the DA’s office — said Monday her office will review all death penalty convictions for any suggestion of prosecutorial racism and antisemitism. At a news conference Monday afternoon, she called it an “ethical obligation.”
“Any practice by prosecutors to eliminate potential jurors based on their race betrays that core pillar of the criminal justice system,” Price said. She later added, “This is not about left or right or any kind of politics.”
Price said the review could go back as far as 1977 — a process that will likely take “a long time.” The potential misconduct, she said, goes well beyond “one or two prosecutors” who were employed during the 1990s.
Barring jurors based on their race or religion is a clear-cut Constitutional violation, but evidence of discrimination is not always easy for courts to determine. In 2019, for instance, a California appeals court ruled that the actions of a prosecutor who barred every Black person from a jury pool was legal, but one justice called for reform in a blistering concurrence.
Documents released by Price’s office on Monday show a prosecutor wrote notes describing one prospective juror as a “short, fat, troll,” made note that others were Black or Jewish and wrote that one supported affirmative action.
Color of Change, a large nonprofit organization that advocates for racial justice, released a statement praising Price for bringing the scandal to light. The group expressed hope that all 35 death-penalty convictions would be overturned.
“For too long, prosecutors have sought to win at all costs, even if it means engaging in constitutional violations, civil rights violations and antisemitic and racially disparate practices that result in people sentenced to death,” the nonprofit’s statement says.
Dykes was convicted in 1995 of murdering 9-year-old Lance Clark, the grandson of a local landlord Dykes was attempting to rob. In an interview with police, he admitted to the attempted robbery but claimed the gun accidentally went off during a struggle, according to court papers filed in his 2009 appeal.
“I didn’t mean for it to go down like that,” Dykes allegedly told police. “I’m no killer.”
After his conviction, jurors sentenced him to death.
Times have drastically changed for California’s death row since Dykes entered the prison system. The state hasn’t executed anyone in nearly 20 years, and Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a moratorium on all executions in 2019. The governor recently vocalized plans to shut down death row at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, disperse all the inmates there to general population prisons throughout California and turn the leftover space into a “place of healing.”
Price opposes the death penalty — and she’s not alone in the Bay Area. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen recently petitioned the county’s Superior Court to commute all death sentences in his county to life without parole, and Contra Costa DA Diana Becton has signed on to an amicus brief arguing that the death penalty is arbitrarily imposed.
Source: www.mercurynews.com