In this month’s Focus, we wrote about a writ petition a coalition of prominent civil rights and legal organizations filed at the CA Supreme Court earlier this month. The writ maintains that “Extensive empirical evidence demonstrates that California’s capital punishment scheme is administered in a racially discriminatory manner and violates the equal protection provisions of the state Constitution.”
The petition asks the Court to declare California’s capital sentencing scheme invalid as applied under the state Constitution and bar future capital prosecutions and trials and the execution of death sentences under those statutes. It was filed by the Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, the ACLU of Northern California, WilmerHale, and the Office of the State Public Defender, on behalf of petitioners OSPD, Witness to Innocence, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Eva Paterson, co-founder of the Equal Justice Society.
Today, the Legal Defense Fund released additional details about the petition, documenting racial disparities in capital sentencing from the late 1970s to the 2000s.
“Despite the moratorium on executions, prosecutors have continued to seek and secure death sentences. Seventeen people have been sentenced to death since 2019. 80% of them are Black or Latino. California was second only to Florida for the most death sentences imposed in 2023; Everyone who was sentenced to death in California last year was Black or Latino,” petitioners note.
“Our petition asks the state Supreme Court to issue an order halting the pursuit of death sentences in California. This extraordinary order would prohibit the Attorney General and all district attorneys from seeking, obtaining, or executing death sentences.”
You can read more about this racial bias challenge and its detailed and undeniable evidence of how the death penalty has been applied in a racially biased manner for decades in California here.
