excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 18,149
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The left, tearing apart the fabric of a civil society, one bit at a time.
This is, of course, the end goal of all these insane policies, allow criminals free rein over society.
This is, of course, the end goal of all these insane policies, allow criminals free rein over society.
What would happen if lawmakers reinvented the criminal-justice system to target “systemic racism” instead of crime? California is about to find out. Thanks to a 2020 law called the California Racial Justice Act, every felon serving time in the state’s prisons and jails can now retroactively challenge his conviction and sentencing on the ground of systemic bias.
To prevail, the incarcerated prisoner need not show that the police officers, prosecutors, judge or jurors in his case were motivated by racism or that his proceedings were unfair. If he can demonstrate that in the past, criminal suspects of his race were arrested, prosecuted or sentenced more often or more severely than members of other racial groups, he will be entitled to a new trial or sentence.
The Racial Justice Act repudiates a key U.S. Supreme Court precedent governing allegations of criminal-justice bias. McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) held that to defeat prosecution or sentencing under federal equal-protection grounds, a defendant must show that decision makers acted with discriminatory purpose; statistical disparities aren’t enough. The Racial Justice Act establishes a new state cause of action that simply presumes that the justice system is biased, obviating the need to show individual discriminatory intent.
California’s criminal-defense bar is lining up an onslaught of litigation. The 2020 law initially applied only to new prosecutions, and even before the onset of retroactivity at the start of 2024, defense lawyers were demanding that district attorneys provide decades’ worth of records, no matter how tangential to their case, to create statistical claims of bias.
...
Court testimony now sounds like a critical race studies course. When a felon in San Francisco contested his arrest and prosecution for having a loaded handgun in his car, a “race expert” testified that the arresting officer’s use of the phrase “high crime area” demonstrated “bias against people of color.” The trial judge disagreed, but an appeals court reversed and allowed the felon’s claim to proceed. (Speaking of bias, that same expert, Dante King, asserted at the University of California, San Francisco, on Feb. 8 that “whites are psychopaths” whose “behavior represents an underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity.”)
On Feb. 14, a state appellate court in San Diego held that a police officer can be guilty of implicit bias against black drivers even if he doesn’t know the race of the driver he stops. Not surprisingly, defense attorneys are now tacking on Racial Justice Act claims to almost any case involving minority defendants.
The defense bar, academia and activist groups know how powerful a tool the California Legislature has handed them. Advocates are tutoring prisoners to file new claims under the law. A lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California recently told a conference at Berkeley Law School: “We have the potential for something grand: to unravel an unjust system. We are celebrating the dawn of a new era.” The act’s author, Assemblyman Ash Kalra, predicted that other states would follow California’s lead and that variants would be enacted in such domains as healthcare and family court. “The possibilities are endless, because racism is so pervasive,” Mr. Kalra told the conference.
A case from Contra Costa County last year shows the snowballing potential of the Racial Justice Act. A judge found that four black gang members who had committed murder as part of a bloody feud between two Oakland gangs had been improperly sentenced to life in prison without parole. That conclusion wasn’t based on flaws in the four defendants’ trials, but simply on an alleged historical pattern of sentencing bias toward black gang murderers. The black comparison group in the case was made up of 30 black defendants who had also committed gang murder in Contra Costa County from 2015 to 2022 and who had also received life without parole. All 30 can now sue to erase those sentences.
...
To prevail, the incarcerated prisoner need not show that the police officers, prosecutors, judge or jurors in his case were motivated by racism or that his proceedings were unfair. If he can demonstrate that in the past, criminal suspects of his race were arrested, prosecuted or sentenced more often or more severely than members of other racial groups, he will be entitled to a new trial or sentence.
The Racial Justice Act repudiates a key U.S. Supreme Court precedent governing allegations of criminal-justice bias. McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) held that to defeat prosecution or sentencing under federal equal-protection grounds, a defendant must show that decision makers acted with discriminatory purpose; statistical disparities aren’t enough. The Racial Justice Act establishes a new state cause of action that simply presumes that the justice system is biased, obviating the need to show individual discriminatory intent.
California’s criminal-defense bar is lining up an onslaught of litigation. The 2020 law initially applied only to new prosecutions, and even before the onset of retroactivity at the start of 2024, defense lawyers were demanding that district attorneys provide decades’ worth of records, no matter how tangential to their case, to create statistical claims of bias.
...
Court testimony now sounds like a critical race studies course. When a felon in San Francisco contested his arrest and prosecution for having a loaded handgun in his car, a “race expert” testified that the arresting officer’s use of the phrase “high crime area” demonstrated “bias against people of color.” The trial judge disagreed, but an appeals court reversed and allowed the felon’s claim to proceed. (Speaking of bias, that same expert, Dante King, asserted at the University of California, San Francisco, on Feb. 8 that “whites are psychopaths” whose “behavior represents an underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity.”)
On Feb. 14, a state appellate court in San Diego held that a police officer can be guilty of implicit bias against black drivers even if he doesn’t know the race of the driver he stops. Not surprisingly, defense attorneys are now tacking on Racial Justice Act claims to almost any case involving minority defendants.
The defense bar, academia and activist groups know how powerful a tool the California Legislature has handed them. Advocates are tutoring prisoners to file new claims under the law. A lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California recently told a conference at Berkeley Law School: “We have the potential for something grand: to unravel an unjust system. We are celebrating the dawn of a new era.” The act’s author, Assemblyman Ash Kalra, predicted that other states would follow California’s lead and that variants would be enacted in such domains as healthcare and family court. “The possibilities are endless, because racism is so pervasive,” Mr. Kalra told the conference.
A case from Contra Costa County last year shows the snowballing potential of the Racial Justice Act. A judge found that four black gang members who had committed murder as part of a bloody feud between two Oakland gangs had been improperly sentenced to life in prison without parole. That conclusion wasn’t based on flaws in the four defendants’ trials, but simply on an alleged historical pattern of sentencing bias toward black gang murderers. The black comparison group in the case was made up of 30 black defendants who had also committed gang murder in Contra Costa County from 2015 to 2022 and who had also received life without parole. All 30 can now sue to erase those sentences.
...
