Instead, the court required a condemned person to prove that “the decisionmakers in his case acted with discriminatory purpose.” Otherwise, the court infamously said, a theory like Mr. Kemp closed off constitutional challenges that rely on showing the racist application of the death penalty. The Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. It’s important to underline just how significant the CRJA is. This law allows defendants to challenge more surreptitious forms of implicit and institutional racism in their cases. The CRJA has an ambitious goal: rooting out racism from the criminal legal system. The California Racial Justice Act’s Ambitious Goal Gavin Newsom signs into law the California Racial Justice Act (CRJA). At an evidentiary hearing, we will introduce evidence to prove that our clients received unequal treatment compared to white people with similar cases and will argue that they should therefore be deemed ineligible for the death penalty.Ĭalifornia Gov. Today, a Riverside Superior Court judge will determine whether our two clients will receive an evidentiary hearing under the CRJA. We represent two Black men, Russell Austin and Michael Mosby, each of whom face the death penalty in Riverside County - one of the most prolific death-sentencing counties in the nation. I am part of a team of attorneys who are bringing the first challenge to death penalty prosecutions under the landmark law known as the California Racial Justice Act (CRJA). These are facts I learned about my home as a legal fellow with the ACLU. Even as of a few months ago, I didn’t know that Riverside’s Hall of Justice sits fewer than two miles from where Lowell Elementary School - which primarily educated Black and Latinx students - was firebombed and destroyed during desegregation protests in 1965. I was unaware that I attended my high school homecoming a few streets down from where “The Birth of a Nation” - a horribly racist film that glorified the lynchings of Black Americans - once hosted its world debut at the Loring Opera House. However, my younger self could never have imagined that the same field I played club soccer on at Riverside Poly High School was used for a Ku Klux Klan recruitment and cross-burning event less than a century earlier. Even when I’ve moved away at different points of my life, the Inland Empire has always been a place that I’ve called home. Long before I joined the ACLU, I was just a skinny brown kid who grew up in the “Inland Empire” - a region of Southern California that includes 52 cities spread across Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Robert Ponce, Legal Fellow, ACLU Capital Punishment Project and ACLU of Southern California

Courts seek root out racism clerk