Death penalty in California: racial bias in juries?

There have been no executions in California since 2006. Although voters supported keeping the death penalty, Governor Gavin Newsom overrode that support in 2019 by imposing a moratorium.

During this stalemate, legal disputes continued, including over a possible racist bias in the imposition of the death penalty in California.

The problem is occurring in Alameda County, explains Shaanth Nanguneri, news intern at CalMatters. In April, a federal judge ordered a review of all death penalty cases by the Alameda district attorney’s office after evidence emerged from a 1995 murder conviction in Oakland that the prosecutor’s office appeared to exclude black and Jewish jurors from participating in jury duty.

Among the dozens of death penalty cases is the 2000 conviction of a Hayward man who murdered and sexually assaulted a young mother. But on Monday, the state’s highest court upheld his death sentence, ruling that the prosecutor had rejected black jurors for valid reasons.

• The regulation: “In each individual case, we come to the conclusion that the reasons given by the public prosecutor were fundamentally plausible and valid.”

Although the court acknowledged that the prosecutor had made some errors during the trial, none of them were serious enough to overturn the jury’s decision.

Research has found that black people in the U.S. have historically been less willing to support punitive measures such as the death penalty, which has led some prosecutors to exclude black jurors. And while there is less data on Jewish Americans’ attitudes toward the death penalty, a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that they are less supportive of it than white Protestants and white Catholics.

This week’s ruling underscored the high hurdles lawyers must overcome when citing racial bias in court as a reason to overturn a death sentence. Racial justice activists gathered outside an Oakland courthouse on Tuesday to call for further accountability.

• Robert Bacona lawyer who works with death penalty opponents: “Unfortunately, it’s business as usual. Both in terms of their indifference to the problem of … racial discrimination in jury selection and in terms of basically putting blinders on and refusing to take into account this information that has come to light.”

The exclusion of certain jurors is not the only reason advocates say California’s death penalty is discriminatory. In April, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a petition claiming California’s death penalty is racially biased and that black people are at least five times more likely to be sent to death row than non-black defendants.

To reduce the number of death sentences, California passed a law in 2022 that makes it easier to challenge convictions and sentences as racially motivated. Last year, four people were sentenced to death in California – all of them black or Latino. As of June 7, there are still 636 inmates on California’s death row.

Read more about the cases in Shaanth’s story.