Alamed Da County withdraws the death penalty for outrage

From Kayla MihalovichCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

The new Alamed District Prosecutor rejects her predecessor’s recommendations to resent the people of death – recommendations caused by a historic review of the System Prosecutor’s Office.

The records received from Calmatters show at least four cases in which District Prosecutor Ursula Jones Dixon has moved to withdraw the resentment requests submitted according to Pamela Price, who was recalled from office In November.

Price started the examination about a year ago after US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria appointed that her office investigated 35 cases of death penalty For a prosecutor’s offense dating from the 80s.

His order cites “strong evidence that in previous decades, prosecutors from the service had been involved in a model of serious violations, automatically excluding Jewish and Afro -American jurors in the case of death penalty.”

The price eventually Recommended resentment of 30 peopleThe majority of people after finding that their constitutional rights had been violated. Of these, 20 people had their day in court and were renowned to conditions less than death with the Judge of the Supreme Court of Alameda District Thomas Stevens.

But this effort stopped when Price was removed. Her resentment team has been dissolved, according to court records and interviews with former employees. And the 10 recommendations for resentment awaiting a decision were redirected to the Judge of the Supreme Court of Alameda Armando Pasteran, a former prosecutor.

Alameda’s Supervisory Authorities Council appointed Jones DicksonA former judge, at her post in February. Her service began to submit requests for the withdrawal of recommendations less than two months later, claiming that this price and her team made insufficient legal arguments and failed to contact the victims and their family members.

“The proposal is based on a significant reassessment of the facts of the case, a legal analysis … Consideration of previous crimes of the petitioner and new information about the wishes of the victims,” ​​writes Deputy Prosecutor General Emily Tiecken in one of the documents.

The decision to cancel the course signals one of the first major changes to the policy that the service adopted after the leaving of Price.

“It’s absolutely shameful,” says Michael Collins, senior director of Color of Change, an organization for racial justice that called on the Prosecutor General to support Price’s review and initiate his own investigation. “It is scandalous that this has happened and now they are trying to bury the cases. The people whose lives have been destroyed – the people who have been conducted non -constitutional trials are not compensated.”

In an interview with Calmatters, Price said her office seeks to achieve justice and this is not guided by politics.

“It was very disturbing,” Price said. “If this is the practice and you do it in these types of cases, what does it mean that you do not do it in other types of cases? So our concern was that we had a huge task for us.”

Alamed District Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to requests for an interview for this story. At a press conference marking his first 100 days of service, Jones Dixon did not answer a question directly about his position in the cases of the death penalty.

“I have no plan for a specific review of death penalty cases that are waiting,” she said. “We are already in the midst of this. It seems that the previous administration has begun this process, and therefore there are cases that are still in anticipation that we review and evaluate and submit proposals for and do the things that the lawyers make. But at that moment I have no policy on the choice of cases to take advantage of the resentment.”

Jonathan Raven, CEO of the California Association of Lawyers, said not every district prosecutor would agree on a specific case.

“Any district prosecutor will always review the policies and practices and review the decisions of the previous district prosecutor, which I think would want the voters – or for sure, the advice of supervisory authorities,” he said.

Differences in the sentences of the death penalty

Decades of research document racial bias in the application of the death penalty. In brief information, presented to the Supreme Court in California, challenging the state’s administration of the state punishment of the state, organizations of legal intercession writes that the defendants of blacks and Latinos are approximately six to nine times more to be sentenced to death than all other defendants.

Governor Gavin Newo quotes this heritage when he stopped the death penalty in California six years ago. But voters consistently confirm the death penalty as a policy and nearly 600 people are imprisoned in state prisons have been sentenced to death.

The allegations of racial discriminatory practices for the selection of jurors in Alameda County were first raised in 2005 by a former prosecutor in a sworn declaration. About 20 years later, Price has announced that her office has revealed evidence of these violations.

The jury selection notes revealed by Price’s cabinet revealed that past prosecutors of Alameda County illegally track and hit potential jurors based on race and religion for decades.

In one case, prosecutors identified the future black female hearing as “short, fat, troll”. Prosecutors wrote about another future court hearing: “I liked it better than any other Jew, but there is no way.”

These findings served as the basis for Judge Chhabria’s order and quickly became a priority for the Price team, which was already outraged by many other types of cases. According to Price and former employees, the office has assembled a team of defenders of witnesses of victims who have contacted all the survivors who have been able to identify.

The appeal reached the Supreme Court in California

The team spent months reviewing the cases, including Greyland Winbush’s sentence. Winbush, a black man, was sentenced to death in 2003 after the murder of Erika Bison during a robbery. He was 19 years old during the crime. In court documents, Winbush’s attorneys say his constitutional rights were violated when prosecutors eliminate all black future jurors and rely on racial stereotypes to characterize him as a superpowder.

In January, Price’s office recommended that he be outraged for up to 30 years to life, admitting that his case “became a reference moment in discussions about the violation of the selection of jurors.” In return, Wowbush agreed that he would no longer continue to appeal his sentence. But approximately three months later, Jones Dixon withdrew the initial recommendation “based on carefully considered the influence of victims and current legal analysis”.

Winbush lawyers claim that the service does not have a factual or legitimate basis to cancel its recommendation, maintaining that “withdrawing a fad recommendation or on the basis of a” change in political winds “is not valid.

The proposal “perpetuates, not also confronted with remedies, a widespread violation based on a race that led a federal judge to direct the service to review his death penalty,” writes the appellate defense lawyer Rebecca Jones. “The original petition for resentment, submitted by the (District Prosecutor’s Office of Alameda County), is part of his attempt to remove the systematic biases reflected by the choice of jurors in the case of G -N -Winbush.”

Alamed Pasteran Supreme Court judge will decide whether to provide Jones Dixon to the cancellation of Winbush’s resentment recommendation in the coming months.

In another case, Jones Dickson was pulling the recommendation for resentment for Jails Albert Nadi, who was sentenced and sentenced to death in 2000 for the murder of a young woman.

Case came for a dispute in the Supreme Court of California last yearAt about the same time, when the Price service came out on evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, but did not consider this evidence and ultimately confirmed the death sentence.

In a divided opinion, the court examined the prosecutor’s decision to reject five of six black women from the Judgment of Nadi’s court jurors and determined that the deputy prosecutor of the prosecutor had valid reasons to hit them, such as his perceptions of their political slopes.

“We lock in any case that the reasons of the prosecutor were inherently plausible and

Supported, “the court ruled by decision 5-2, citing evidence from the questionnaires of the jurors and the interrogation of the prosecutor of the affected jurors.

In disagreement, justice Gudwin Liu referred to the Federal Court’s decision, which directs the cost of reviewing the death penalty. “The decision is more specially referring to the federal court on the election of a capital jury in Alameda County at the time Nadi was tried,” Liu writes.

Kayla Mihalovic is California local news.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.