A federal judge has ordered Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price to review all of the death penalty cases handled by the district attorney’s office after uncovering evidence that prosecutors may have wrongfully worked to systematically exclude Black people and Jews from the juries of homicide cases.
In an order issued today, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria said that the hand-written notes of prosecutors from a 31-year-old murder case “constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the [Alameda County District Attorney’s] office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases.”
Ernest Dykes was convicted in 1995 of attempting to murder Bernice Clark and murdering her 9-year-old grandson, Lance Clark, during an attempted $75 robbery. Dykes was sentenced to death in 1995 by an Alameda County jury and held at San Quentin State Prison.
Dykes won a stay of execution in 2011 and the next year filed what’s known as a petition for habeas corpus, arguing that he wasn’t afforded the opportunity of a fair trial. His attorneys made numerous different arguments about the quality of Dykes’ defense and the actions of the prosecutors before the case was eventually handed over to Chhabria.
According to Judge Chhabria’s ruling, Price handed over jury selection notes from the original 1993 trial to him and Dykes’ attorneys. The notes appear to show that the prosecutors who handled the case identified Jewish people and Black people and purposefully sought to exclude them from the jury pool based on their race and ethnicity.
Price said today that the notes were recently found by a deputy district attorney in the Dykes case file and promptly handed over to Chhabria and the defense. The District Attorney in 1993 was John J. Meehan, a career prosecutor who was hand-picked by his predecessor, Lowell Jensen, to run the office. Tom Orloff took over the DA’s office in 1994 after Meehan endorsed him and he was elected. Colton Carmine was the lead prosecutor in the Dykes case, according to KQED, and he was assisted in jury selection by Morris Jacobson, who today is an Alameda County judge.
Excerpts of records released by Price’s office appear to show that prosecutors tried to identify whether people were Jewish or Black during the process for selecting jurors for trials. One undated note referred to a potential juror as a “short, fat, troll.” Another describing a prospective Black female juror reads, “says race no issue but I don’t believe her.”
The apparent attempts to exclude Black and Jewish people from juries in homicide cases may have been based upon the belief that these groups would be less likely to convict someone if a death sentence was possible. Any exclusion of potential jurors because of their race or religion would have been unconstitutional.
Price said this behavior was not limited to one or two prosecutors but involved “a variety of prosecutors.” Price added that people who were identified in this manner did not end up on juries.
“The evidence suggests plainly that many people did not receive a fair trial in Alameda County and as a result we have to review all of the files to determine what happened,” Price said during a press conference before the San Francisco Federal Building on Monday.
Price’s office is reviewing 35 active death penalty cases, and will potentially review matters dating to 1977. She said the review is starting with death penalty cases but other cases may be implicated.
The DA’s Office is in the process of notifying the families of victims of the people whose death penalty cases will be affected. Price said her office has set up an email address and hotline for anyone who may have been impacted.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on the death penalty and closed the state’s gas chamber at San Quentin. Part of Newsom’s rationale was that the state’s “death penalty system is unfair, unjust, wasteful, protracted and does not make our state safer.” Research has shown that Black people are much more likely to be sentenced to death than other groups, even controlling for similar types of crimes and circumstances.
At least three people convicted in Alameda County have already been resentenced due to evidence that prosecutors removed Black female and Jewish jurors, according to KQED. In 2006, the California Supreme Court rejected claims that an Alameda County Superior Court judge advised a prosecutor to remove Jewish jurors from a death penalty trial. The court also dismissed claims that the county DA had a policy of barring Jewish people and Black women from cases that could lead to death sentences.
