As many as 35 death penalty cases in California’s Alameda County from the past 30 years are under review after a deputy district attorney discovered notes from the 1993 death penalty conviction of Ernest Dykes indicating that prosecutors excluded Jewish and Black female individuals from the jury pool.
In a press release issued Monday, Alameda County DA Pamela Price said that after “the notes were promptly disclosed to the defense and the Court,” U.S. Federal District Court Judge Vince Chhabria, who is presiding over Dykes’ resentencing settlement, ordered the county to look for “any potential signs of prosecutorial misconduct in the form of the exclusion of jurors based solely on race” going back 30 years.
Noting that the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, Price stated, “Any practice by prosecutors to eliminate potential jurors because of their race betrays that core pillar of the criminal justice system.” The DA’s office says they have identified 35 death penalty cases from 1977 that are now being reviewed.
Dykes was convicted in 1993 of the attempted murder of Bernice Clark and the murder of her nine-year-old grandson Lance Clark during an attempted robbery. He was sentenced to death in 1995.
The District Attorney’s Office is contacting victims and survivors whom this development may impact. The office urges anyone who has not been contacted but was directly involved in one of these cases to contact the assigned Victim-Witness Advocates at 510-208-9555 or email them at shawnmitchell@acgov.org.
