The Riverside District Attorney’s Office filed opposition May 6 to a lawsuit that asks the California Supreme Court to declare the death penalty in violation of California’s Constitution.
The April 9 lawsuit was brought by the Office of the State Public Defender and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
The death penalty has been paused by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order since March 13, 2013. Although defendants can still be sentenced with the death penalty, they will currently not be executed.
The DA’s opposition says that the request is improperly filed, asks for improper relief, is denied by the California Constitution, and relies on faulty data.
“Even if this Court ignores the procedural irregularities, deliberate exclusion of interested parties, and constitutional and statutory barriers to relief, the petition still fails on its face. The petition relies on faulty, out-of-date analyses that ignore regional differences in demographics and fail to account for the circumstances of the killings and killers for whom capital punishment is sought. Petitioners’ arguments reflect a lack of understanding of California criminal law and an unwillingness to follow it,” the opposition says.
The lawsuit could nullify over 600 death sentences brought by juries, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Date
The petition filed by the State Public Defender claims that empirical evidence proves racial disparities in death penalty convictions. It bases that claim on a 2023, 1,080-page report from the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. It recommended the death penalty be abolished. The report said that only 6.5% of California’s population are Black, but one third of people on death row are Black.
The petition says that Black defendants are 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than other defendants and Latino defendants are 6.2 times more likely to be sentenced to death than other defendants.
“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 reads.
The DA’s opposition says that the statistical analysis used by the petitioners to determine racial differences is unreliable.
The petitioners looked at statewide data, but the decision to seek the death penalty is made by individual prosecutors. The sample size for Riverside County—22 death penalty cases over six years—is too small to analyze, the opposition said.
“Criminal prosecutions come in an infinite array of fact patterns, criminal history, aggravating and mitigating evidence, and racial composition of defendants, victims, and witnesses. A change in filing decision in just two or three of the 22 death penalty cases filed in Riverside County during the District Attorney’s administration would have an enormous impact on the overall results of any statistical analysis,” the opposition said.
Other studies indicate that case complexity is the main driver of the death penalty, not race, the DA’s opposition argues.
Procedural issues
The DA’s opposition says that the petition should be denied immediately because it does not identify any person who has been sentenced with the death penalty as a plaintiff.
It also said that the petition fails to provide any record from the death penalty proceedings it seeks to invalidate. This, the DA says, violates a provision of the California Constitution that requires proof of an error that leads to a miscarriage of justice to reverse a case.
It also says that other remedies can be brought before death sentences are removed across the state. Each individual sentence can be appealed, and a new law, the Racial Justice Act, allows defendants to bring allegations of conviction based on race or ethnicity.
Constitutionality and legality
The DA’s opposition also says that the death penalty is expressly allowed by California’s Constitution. Article 1, Section 27, says that the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment, “nor shall (the death penalty) for such offenses be deemed to contravene any other provision of this constitution.”
It goes on to say that the petition is in violation of Penal Code Section 1509, which says that “a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to this section is the exclusive procedure for collateral attack on a judgment of death.”
The petition cites an amicus brief provided by Newsom in a 2018 death penalty appeal: “The overwhelming majority of studies that have analyzed America’s death penalty have found that racial disparities are pervasive, and that the race of the defendant and the race of the victim impact whether the death penalty will be imposed.”
The petition also says that death-sentencing procedures invite racial bias, by leaving them entirely up to district attorneys instead of offering uniform criteria to guide prosecutors.
“The California Constitution does not permit a two-tiered system of justice where the most severe sentence the state has on its books is imposed overwhelmingly on Black and Brown people,” said Lisa Romo, senior deputy state public defender, in a press release. “We urge the Court to address this long-standing injustice and ensure that Black and Brown people are no longer sentenced disproportionately to death.”
Case No. S284496
Read the petition here.
Read the DA’s opposition here.
