California Supreme Court Overturns Death Sentence Under Racial Justice Act

from Nigel DuaraCalMatters

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The Supreme Court of California this week abolished the death sentence of a Los Angeles Bloods gang member convicted of killing a rival Crip in the early 1990s because a prosecutor compared him to a dangerous animal, the first time a death sentence was overturned under the Racial Justice Act of 2020.

Anthony Bankston represented himself in court in 1991. A jury found him guilty. During the penalty phase of the trial, a prosecutor compared Bankston – appearing in a suit and tie – to a Bengal tiger at the zoo.

The prosecutor’s story was that a journalist observed a Bengal tiger in a zoo and was told by a hunter, “that’s not a Bengal tiger.” Instead, the journalist travels to India, where he finds a tiger, “all stretched out, he sees the claws out, he sees the teeth, . . . he hears the growl.”

The hunter says to him, “Now you see a Bengal tiger.” The story was meant to illustrate that Bankston in court was not the same man as Bankston on the street, whom the prosecutor described as a “killing machine.”

California Supreme Court justices found the comparison harmful in a unanimous two-match decision. They overturned Bankston’s death sentence, but the murder conviction still stood, meaning the high court sent Bankston’s conviction back to the trial court.

It was one of four decisions handed down by the Supreme Court this week stemming from claims under the Racial Justice Act, which allows inmates to appeal their sentences if they believe racial bias has tainted their trials.

The court upheld the death sentences for two of the men: Alex Demollwho was convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl; and Marcos Esquivel Barrerawho was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering two of his children.

In the fourth case, the court amended the decisions against two convicted prisoners of Southeast Asian originbut not because of their claims in the Racial Justice Act.

A spokesman for the Judicial Council of California confirmed that Bankston’s case was the first reversal of a death sentence by the California Supreme Court due to violations of Racial Justice Act.

According to Bankston’s appeal decision, the Bengal tiger parable has appeared several times in various cases, so much so that the high court called it a “worn story”.

In a 2010 case, the Supreme Court found that the Bengal tiger metaphor was not a prejudicial statement about the defendant’s Vietnamese heritage. In a 2018 lawsuit, a defendant said the Bengal tiger story was used to “dehumanize” him, an argument California Supreme Court justices rejected.

But in 2020, the Legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, which included a ban on certain depictions of animals that risk drawing racial bias. The law itself specifically mentions the Bengal tiger example.

“In light of the passage of the RJA, we now make clear that whatever the intent behind the telling of the story, the story of the Bengal tiger should no longer be told in California courtrooms,” wrote Justice Leondra Krueger for the majority. “There is no reason to allow prosecutors to continue to risk invoking biases that undermine the very foundation of a system of equal justice simply to make an unremarkable opinion about a defendant’s behavior outside of a controlled courtroom.”

Comparisons of defendants to animals do not automatically qualify as violations of the Racial Justice Act. A case in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals this year found that comparing a defendant to a dog left in a car with a Slurpee was fair comparison point to the concept of circumstantial evidence.

The Bankston decision similarly noted that references such as “an eager beaver,” “happy as a clam,” “free as a bird,” or “quiet as a mouse” would not rise to the level of violations of the Racial Justice Act.

Bankston, who is black, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder for separate shootings in 1991. He was convicted of shooting and killing Benson Jones and attempting to kill Benson’s brother, Benjamin.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.