When California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Racial Justice Act into law in 2020, its author, Assemblymember Ash Kalra, hailed it as “an historic foundational step in upholding Constitutional protections for everyone and moving us closer to a system that truly reflects justice for all.”
But Kalra also acknowledged, “There is still much more work to do in fixing our broken criminal justice system.” Four years later, that work has yet to begin.
A Garrison Project and CalMatters study of the RJA finds that “In the four years the law has been in existence, defendants in only about a dozen cases have succeeded in proving that bias affected their criminal case.”
Part of the problem could be that the state doesn’t keep data on RJA cases, so there is no “systematic way to track cases,” according to the study. As a result, successes “are spread by word of mouth,” and rejections are “buried in court filings,” resulting in no hard evidence of how effective or ineffective the law is.
The Garrison Project says it spoke with dozens of attorneys, legal experts, and advocates in more than a dozen counties to ascertain its effectiveness, and it concludes that “the results so far are mixed.”
