SACRAMENTO, CA – The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies published an article on the Wiley Online Library recently that strongly suggests racial disparities in charging and sentencing are being remedied by the California Racial Justice Act of 2020, which addresses the unlimited discretion held by prosecutors, jurors and judges.
The authors charge, “racial factors have infected California capital sentencing.”
Catherine M. Grosso from the Michigan State University College of Law, Jeffrey Fagan from Columbia Law School, and Michael Laurence from the Law Offices of Michael Laurence focus on and include murder and manslaughter conviction data from the California state courts from the year 1978 to 2002.
“The results show an entrenched pattern of racial disparities in charging and sentencing that privileges white victim cases, as well as patterns of racial disparities in who is charged and sentenced to death in California courts that are the natural result of California’s capacious statutory definition of death eligibility, which permits virtually unlimited discretion for charging and sentencing decisions,” they note.
The article reflects on the book, “Geometrical Justice,” a classic sociological theory written by legal scholars stating, “death sentences reflect the ordering of social status of defendants and their victims that intersects with the details of cases to shape the decisions that privilege some races and genders-– those in higher status positions of society-– in the allocation of justice.”
The authors report California’s noncompliance with the Supreme Court’s decision to narrow the application of capital punishment, despite the ruling in Furman v Georgia where the 1972 death penalty statutes were deemed violations of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
However, “California, like several other states, has chosen to implement the narrowing requirement by broadly defining capital offenses and then requiring the trier of fact to find at least one statutory aggravating factor that defines the defendant’s crime as capital-eligible,” the article states.
The authors note the “special circumstances” in which officials choose a death sentence is broad enough to give them unlimited discretion. The Racial Justice Act assists in this regard, where it allows an individual to take action if they feel as if the legal official exhibited any sort of bias.
According to the article, jury selection and decision making may play a role in the racial disparities within capital sentencing, writing, “racism—explicit, implicit, and structural continues to produce disparities in how jurisdictions summon potential jurors, whom the court excuses for cause or hardship, and how lawyers exercise their peremptory strikes.”
Additionally, the authors report that even in many communities of color in California the juries are predominantly white and studies have found that juries without diversity tend to be more punitive.
Moreover, the authors share that judges’ decisions might be impacted by their personal backgrounds, professional and life experiences, and partisan and ideological loyalty.
Ultimately, the authors found, “combined Black defendants faced between 4.6 and 8.7 times higher odds and Latinx defendants faced between 3.2and 6.2 times higher odds of being sentenced to death, even after controlling for relevant difference in the cases.
“Similarly, persons convicted of killing at least one white victim faced between 2.8 and 8.8 higher odds of being sentence to death than defendants who kill non-white victims.”
Finally, the authors state, “Our current analysis demonstrates that, in practice, racial factors have infected California capital sentencing: whether sentencing is considered in the aggregate or as decisions made by prosecutors or juries, racial considerations determine who is subject to the ultimate punishment in California.”
