OAKLAND, CA — Jennifer Gonnerman from The New Yorker this month released a comprehensive chronology of a decades-long investigation into the Alameda County District Attorney’s office and unearthed a past history of constitutional violations.
Aimee Solway, a deputy district attorney, was assigned in March 2024 to the role of reviewing old convictions after federal Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California ordered some cases to be reopened to ease the death row backlog since Gov. Newsom’s suspension on capital punishment, according to The New Yorker.
One such case follows the accused, Ernest Dykes, 51, convicted to death row and has remained there for 30 years. Solway, in trying to look for police reports, stumbled upon a stack of index cards that contained handwritten comments for jury selection, Gonnerman reported.
“One card described an ‘MW’—male, white—who was a Republican and in favor of the death penalty,” which Gonnerman and Solway believed “didn’t seem too surprising” at first. However, the next card read, “Don’t believe she could vote D/P (death penalty)” and “Short, Fat, Troll” for a Black woman, according to Solway.
Gonnerman detailed that more index cards read, “Jewish background” and “I liked him better than any other Jew But No Way… Must Kick, too Risky.”
“If prosecutors in Dykes’s case had discriminated against potential jurors, his constitutional rights had been violated,” wrote Gonnerman. Solway also reportedly “knew that the remedy for that sort of violation was to reverse the conviction.”
“I don’t think we can settle this case without disclosing this evidence,” Solway told her supervisor after this discovery, detailed by Gonnerman. She believed that these cards should be handed over to Dykes’s lawyers.
After seeing the cards for himself, Judge Chhabria ordered Pamela Price, Alameda County district attorney, to do a “full review of the office’s past capital convictions,” according to The New Yorker.
The New Yorker noted that Price, the first Black person elected for the position (she was recalled by voters Nov. 5), stated that they had “pretty incontrovertible evidence that you’re excluding Jewish people” from the jury, after she studied the notes.
At a press conference on April 22, 2024, Price announced, “We do have notes made by prosecutors in some of the cases,” as well as courtroom transcripts showing “the ways in which the jurors were questioned.”
Price said the evidence “suggests plainly that many people did not receive a fair trial in Alameda County,” and that “it is something that we have to make right.”
The New Yorker reported that Price’s staff dug into decades-old files and identified “thousands of pages of jury-selection materials,” while also revealing jury-selection “tactics” that were once used by past prosecutors in an “elite group” within the Alameda County DA office, long before Price got there.
The New Yorker highlighted this group as the “Death Team.”
The investigation into Dykes’s case soon led the current staff to James Anderson, head of the Death Team from 1991 to 2004, and John “Jack” Quatman, who publicly spoke for the 1992 three-day state seminar for all district attorneys on “jury selection,” according to The New Yorker.
Anderson and Quatman used to be “close friends,” Gonnerman noted, and were “among the highest-profile prosecutors in the courthouse” before Quatman publicly spoke out against the office in 2003-2005.
Gonnerman also explained that both prosecutors and defense attorneys had the names of all the prospective jurors ahead of the “Big Spin,” the phase when a courtroom clerk spins a canister and read off the first 12 names to sit in the jury box.
“During the Big Spin, both prosecutors and defense attorneys could use an allotted number of peremptory challenges (26 for each side), which did not require an explanation, to remove jurors,” Gonnerman explained, also adding that “Discrimination based on where a person lives is legally permissible.”
The California Supreme Court banned striking jurors due to their race, ethnicity, or religion in 1978, and in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court banned prosecutors nationwide from striking jurors based on race in Batson v. Kentucky.
Anderson told Gonnerman, “I had a cardinal rule: if they lived in Berkeley, they were off the panel.”
Quatman agreed, adding for Gonnerman, “You didn’t want those guys on the jury. They start questioning everything you do.”
Quatman enlightened Gonnerman on how the prosecutors should normally use the index cards—one for each juror. According to Quatman, there wasn’t enough time to read every card, so they would assign each with a score, the New Yorker wrote.
“Zero is somebody you want to get off that jury any way you can,” Quatman explained, adding, “My rule was six and above.” Quatman also told Gonnerman that there was no official protocol, as some prosecutors kept the notes, while others discarded them.
When Gonnerman from The New Yorker showed Dykes’s cards to Quatman, now 78 and retired, he was baffled after reading “Must Kick, too Risky.”
“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Quatman said, “You don’t put the reasons down on the card that you take to court. You just grade him.”
Judge Chhabria also appointed Brian Pomerantz from North Carolina and Kathryn Tria from Los Angeles to represent Dykes in settlement conferences, according to The New Yorker. They were working alongside Solway to find proof of prosecutorial misconduct.
Gonnerman wrote Tria stated, “I’ve seen a lot of disturbing things,” referring to how prosecutors sometimes wrote notes that had “nothing to do with their views,” with one of the cards describing a white woman as “Attractive for Age” or another woman as “cute” and “Loves Animals,” on top of the “She can do it!” on the latter’s likelihood of voting for a death verdict.
Pomerantz and Tria, according to Gonnerman, also found evidence showing that “Alameda County prosecutors had been documenting which potential jurors were Jewish or Black into the two-thousands,” including a list from 2008 that consisted of summaries of potential jurors and the phrases “Juror is African American” in bold type next to certain names, according to The New Yorker.
Gonnerman stated the list, according to Pomerantz, was “clearly trying to make it stand out.”
Pomerantz once told Solway, “Your office (Alameda County) has been dirty for 40 years. You know it and I know it. If your D.A. really wants to be a progressive prosecutor, go into the files,” detailed Gonnerman.
And, according to the source, that was how Solway discovered the index cards under Dykes’s files, the New Yorker wrote.
In Aug. 2024, Pamela Price apologized at a press conference due to Anderson’s legacy.
Gonnerman was informed of Price’s declaration. “Because of prosecutorial misconduct, because of the failure of Mr. Anderson and so many failures over the years,” the victim’s family was having to endure the trauma of “having this whole situation once again brought up,” Price asserted.
Anderson, now 81, believed otherwise. Gonnerman quoted Anderson stating, “I think they’re going after me because I’ve got the most capital verdicts in the state…I’m pretty proud of what I did, and I’m very upset with the way Miss Price is trying to undo hard work, which I think was fairly done.”
Anderson added, “I think she’s doing it just because of race.” When Gonnerman asked him to elaborate for The New Yorker, he explained, “Because the people she’s trying to undo the cases—the defendants’ races are Black. I don’t see her trying to undo cases of the white defendants I’ve convicted.”
The New Yorker presented Price’s response, as she stated, “All of the cases under review are not only Black defendants. Mr. Anderson is not well informed.”
“It’s not a racist thing, but just common sense,” Anderson argued, according to The New Yorker. “It is an axiom. It is not because of prejudice. Their politics are not going to be on your side.”
On Aug. 13, 2024, Dykes received his resentencing after reviewing “recognizable evidence of constitutional violations at trial,” his young age at the time of crime, and a proper sentencing to be “25 to life,” Gonnerman detailed.
According to court records, Tria argued “Mr. Dykes has now served over 30 years.”
Solway told The New Yorker that the psychologist, after meeting with Dykes as a condition to his resentencing, found “there is precious little reason to believe that the defendant will return to a life of crime.”
While Dykes is to be released from prison in the spring, The New Yorker highlighted some concerns from the attorneys of people on death row.
In light of the Nov. 5 recall vote succeeding, there are worries that once Price is removed from office in Dec. 2024, her successor would be “less committed to resentencing their clients,” Gonnerman wrote.
“Out of 34 defendants from Alameda County who were in prison with death sentences this spring,” Gonnerman revealed, “14 have been resentenced.”
