In California’s Riverside County, two Black men challenging their separate death penalty prosecutions under the California Racial Justice Act (AB 256) were granted evidentiary hearings by a California Court of Appeals late last month.
Russell Austin and Michael Mosby argued that “the death penalty in Riverside County is tainted with racial inequality — and offered statistical studies, along with other evidence, reaching that conclusion,” the ACLU Southern California announced in a press release.
The California Racial Justice Act for All, signed into law in 2022, prohibits the state from seeking or obtaining a criminal conviction or imposing a sentence based on race, ethnicity, or national origin.
“This is exactly how the California Racial Justice Act is meant to work. The initial threshold to obtain an evidentiary hearing to prove our case under the CRJA should be easy to meet. The CRJA can only be effective if it is readily accessible to people whose cases are negatively impacted by systemic racial bias,” stated Claudia Van Wyk, an ACLU Capital Punishment Project senior staff attorney.
In its 2021 Death Penalty Report, the California Committee on Revision of the Penal Code noted that, in Riverside County from 2010–2020, “86% of people sentenced to death were people of color. Black people made up 7% of the county population during this time but accounted for 26% of the 42 new death sentences. Of the 88 people on death row who were sentenced in Riverside County, 76% are people of color.”
Of the top five death-sentencing counties in California — Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, San Bernardino, and Alameda — Riverside ranks second, behind Los Angeles.
