In a ruling that calls into question numerous death penalty convictions in Alameda County, a federal judge found “strong evidence” that prosecutors there made a conscious effort to keep people off of juries based on their race and religion.
A Monday order by U.S. District Judge Vincent Chhabria suggests evidence of this systemic racism and anti-semitism was hiding in plain sight, within the case file for a death row inmate named Ernest Dykes, in the form of prosecution notes from Dykes’ 1995 jury trial. It was only brought to Chhabria’s attention in 2023, by a county prosecutor who was assigned to review Dykes’ conviction.
“These notes — especially when considered in conjunction with evidence presented in other cases — constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases,” Chhabria wrote in his Monday ruling that lifts a protective order on the notes in question.
There are 35 death penalty convictions in Alameda County that may be affected by these findings.
District Attorney Pamela Price — who ran in 2022 on a platform that including pledging to root out “corruption” in the DA’s office — issued a statement Monday pledging to review all death penalty convictions for racism and anti-semitism. In a news conference Monday afternoon, she called it an “ethical obligation” and Constitutional violation.
“Any practice by prosecutors to eliminate potential jurors based on their race betrays that core pillar of the criminal justice system,” Price said. She later added, “This is not about left or right or any kind of politics. This is an ethical obligation.”
Price said the review could go back as far as 1977 and that the review will likely take “a long time.” She said that the potential misconduct goes well beyond “one or two prosecutors” who were employed during the 1990s.
Barring jurors based on their race or religion is a clearcut Constitutional violation, but evidence of discrimination is not always easy for courts to determine. In 2019, for instance, a California appeals court ruled that a prosecutor who barred every Black person from a jury pool was legal, but one justice called for reform in a blistering concurrence.
Documents released by Price’s office on Monday show a prosecutor wrote notes describing one officer as a “short, fat, troll,” made note that others were Black or Jewish, and wrote that one supported Affirmative Action.
Color of Change, a large nonprofit advocating for racial justice, released a statement praising Price for bringing the scandal to light and hoping that all 35 death convictions would be overturned.
“For too long, prosecutors have sought to win at all costs, even if it means engaging in constitutional violations, civil rights violations and antisemitic and racially disparate practices that result in people sentenced to death,” the nonprofit’s statement says.
Dykes was convicted in 1995 of murdering 9-year-old Lance Clark, the grandson of a local landlord Dykes was attempting to rob. In an interview with police, he admitted to the attempted robbery but claimed the gun accidentally went off during a struggle, according to court papers filed in his 2009 appeal.
“I didn’t mean for it to go down like that,” Dykes allegedly told police. “I’m no killer.”
After his conviction, jurors sentenced him to death.
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