SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (CN) — California’s death penalty is racially discriminatory and goes against the state Constitution's equal protection guarantees, according to advocates seeking to stop the state from imposing capital punishment.
A consortium of civil rights organizations and legal groups filed a writ of mandate petition on Tuesday in the Supreme Court of California on behalf of petitioners like Witness to Innocence, LatinoJustice, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the Equal Justice Society. They say that there is well-documented evidence of racial bias in how California wields the death penalty.
The petition cites several studies reporting disparities, including that Black people are at least four times more likely to be sentenced to death than non-Black defendants, with Latinos at least three times more likely to receive the death penalty than others.
The plaintiffs also say that the death penalty does not reliably deter crime and serves as “retribution” rather than rehabilitation. They argue that tolerating racial discrimination in exacting that penalty “profoundly damages communities of color, perpetuates corrosive biases, and rightly undermines confidence in the fairness of the justice system.”
Assistant counsel Patricia Okonta of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said that because “capital punishment has roots in slavery, lynchings and white vigilantism ... maintaining these violent remnants of racial subordination is unconscionable and has no place in modern society.”
Lisa Romo, California's senior deputy public defender, said that the court should address the injustices committed in applying the death penalty to “ensure that Black and brown people are no longer sentenced disproportionately to death.”
“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,” Romero said.
Jessica Lewis of Wilmer Cutler Pickering, representing the plaintiffs, said that California’s capital punishment scheme and other tools of "racial violence" have historically been weaponized to harm people of color, she said.
“The empirical evidence described in the petition demonstrates that the death penalty in California has long been administered in a racially discriminatory manner, in violation of the equal protection guarantees of the California Constitution,” Lewis said.
Claudia Van Wyk, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, added: “This case gives the California Supreme Court an opportunity to implement the state’s core constitutional values and right this wrong.”
The Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project and ACLU of Northern California, law firm WilmerHale and the office of the State Public Defender filed the claims. The plaintiffs seek a writ of mandate to provide relief by finding that the state’s death penalty as currently applied violates citizens’ right to equal protection under the law.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Governor Gavin Newsom’s offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Both officials have acknowledged pervasive racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty.
Newsom signed an executive order in 2019 instituting a moratorium on the death penalty in California, saying that “death sentences are unevenly and unfairly applied to people of color.
In a 2021 amicus brief submitted in People v. McDaniel, Newsom said that 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.”
In 2021, Bonta said that capital punishment has “long had a disparate impact on defendants of color, especially when the victim is white.”
ACLU of Northern California's Criminal Justice Program deputy director Avi Frey said that Bonta was correct.
“The question is what the attorney general intends to do about this unconstitutional reality," Frey said. "As the state’s chief law enforcement officer, and an avowed defender of equal justice under the law, we would hope and expect that the attorney general would take affirmative steps to dismantle this racially motivated and disparate system.”
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Prison Advocacy coordinator Morgan Zamora said: “Even after Governor Newsom’s 2019 moratorium on executions, 17 people — 80% of whom are Black or Latino — have been sentenced to death. Black and brown Californians deserve for our state to live up to its values and take the necessary steps to finally end the death penalty.”
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