Last week, CalMatters reported that newly-appointed Alameda County District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson had begun withdrawing death penalty resentencing petitions filed by her predecessor, Pamela Price.
The story, entitled “New Alameda County DA Changes Course on Historic Death Penalty Resentencing,” described the shift as limited to four cases and framed it as a disagreement over legal strategy.
But a deeper look reveals a far more sweeping and troubling campaign—one that threatens to unravel years of work uncovering unconstitutional practices by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office (ACDAO) and reinstate a system defined by prosecutorial misconduct.
Court filings and defense responses reviewed by this publication show that the DA’s office, under Jones Dickson, has moved to withdraw nearly every unresolved resentencing petition tied to the 2023 federal mandate from U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria.
That order required the ACDAO to review 35 capital cases for patterns of racial and religious discrimination in jury selection going back more than three decades. These violations had been brought to light in part by Jack Quatman, who provided a sworn declaration in 2003 revealing that DA offices in the 1980s and 1990s were tracking and excluding Black and Jewish jurors.
Pamela Price launched the review in response to Chhabria’s findings, and her team ultimately recommended resentencing in 30 of the 35 cases, asserting that the violations rendered the original trials unconstitutional.
Twenty of those recommendations were granted by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Thomas Stevens, who reviewed the case files and ruled in favor of resentencing. The remaining ten were pending when Price was recalled from office in November 2024.
Since taking office in February, Jones Dickson has not only moved to reverse at least four of those recommendations, but is actively working to withdraw all remaining petitions and has disbanded the team Price assembled to carry out the federal order.
In Miguel Sifuentes’s case, the Alameda DA’s office reversed its own recommendation just five months after it was filed. The motion to withdraw, signed by Deputy District Attorney Emily Tienken, claimed that the original filing “was based on a substantive reevaluation of the facts of the case, legal analysis…consideration of petitioner’s prior crimes, and new information about the victims’ wishes.”
But defense attorneys representing Miguel Sifuentes strongly disputed that characterization.
In a 40-page opposition brief filed on June 3, 2025, attorneys Katherine Hallinan and Brian M. Pomerantz wrote, “The unelected District Attorney has not done a good faith reevaluation of Sifuentes’s suitability for release. Instead, as in so many other cases before this Court, they are trying to cobble together reasons to thwart resentencing.”
They continued, “While the facts of this case are unique, the fact that the District Attorney is seeking to uproot virtually all, if not all, resentencings, is relevant to this Court’s consideration. The concept that only the ones that were not resolved prior to Jones Dickson’s installation are flawed is ludicrous.”
The defense cites People v. Vaesau (2023) 94 Cal.App.5th 132, a case in which the appellate court made clear that a district attorney cannot withdraw a resentencing petition based solely on a change in political leadership.
“Permitting a district attorney to withdraw its recommendation on a whim, or due to a change in the political winds, is not consistent with [Assembly Bill No. 1540’s] purpose,” the court wrote in that decision.
The Sifuentes brief quotes this passage extensively, arguing that “there has been no such change in circumstances or error sufficient to warrant the withdrawal.”
According to the filing, the resentencing recommendation for Sifuentes was the result of a year-long process that included multiple parole hearings, an in-depth reentry evaluation, and a review of decades of incarceration records.
The prosecutor who signed the original petition spoke in support of parole at Sifuentes’s 2023 hearing and referenced his extensive rehabilitation efforts.
“Just because the prosecution did not include a fact in their original brief does not mean they did not consider it,” the brief states. “The opposite conclusion reached by the new regime in the District Attorney’s office is a product of politics, not increased diligence.”
One of the most alarming aspects of the office’s current strategy, defense attorneys argue, is the apparent effort to obscure the very misconduct that triggered the resentencing process.
“The prosecution’s assertion that the original petition ‘wrongly suggested that there may have been constitutional errors with defendant’s conviction’ is not only an attempt to obfuscate the evidence of the unconstitutional and systemic misconduct perpetrated by the ACDAO… it also misrepresents the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in Sifuentes v. Brazelton (2016) 815 F.3d 490,” the defense wrote.
They pointed out that Judge Morris Jacobson, now a superior court judge, denied Sifuentes’s prior habeas petition under Penal Code section 1170.95 in 2021, despite findings that Sifuentes was neither the actual killer, a direct aider and abettor, nor a major participant acting with reckless indifference. The denial relied on the “peace officer” exception under state law.
“Judge Jacobson played a critical role in keeping the wrongdoing of the ACDAO hidden for decades,” the defense filing asserts.
In a separate case, Grayland Winbush was sentenced to death at 19 after prosecutors used racially coded language to portray him as a “superpredator” and removed every Black prospective juror from the pool. Price’s office recommended resentencing in January 2024. But just months later, Dickson’s office filed a motion to withdraw the recommendation, again citing victims’ concerns and new legal analysis.
“This motion perpetuates, rather than confronts and remedies, the widespread race-based misconduct that led a federal judge to direct the office to review its death penalty cases,” wrote appellate defense attorney Rebecca Jones in her opposition brief.
The defense brief also notes that in at least one case—the resentencing petition for Giles Albert Nadey—the California Supreme Court acknowledged the serious concerns raised by the federal court. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Goodwin Liu wrote, “The decision is particularly jarring given what has come to light in federal court regarding capital jury selection in Alameda County around the time that Nadey was tried.”
Jones Dickson has offered no clear policy or explanation for the blanket withdrawals.
In her April press conference marking 100 days in office, she stated, “I don’t have a plan to specifically review any death penalty cases that are pending,” and added, “I don’t have a policy at this point regarding choosing cases to pull for resentencing.” Yet her office has moved uniformly to rescind support in every known unresolved resentencing case.
Outside observers are alarmed. “It’s absolutely disgraceful,” said Michael Collins, senior director at Color of Change. “The people whose lives were destroyed—the people who were given unconstitutional trials—are not getting any indemnification.”
Defense attorneys in multiple cases have also raised concerns that Dickson’s office is misrepresenting incarcerated individuals’ records in order to justify reversal. In the Sifuentes case, the DA’s office claimed that his disciplinary record was worse than initially disclosed and that his rehabilitation efforts were insufficient. But prison records show that Sifuentes has had no serious rule violations since 2016 and that the one infraction cited—misuse of mail—was a non-violent, minor incident that led only to a “counseling chrono.” He has never been disciplined for any violent behavior during his 27 years of incarceration.
Defense attorneys accuse the DA’s office of manufacturing grounds for withdrawal by reinterpreting old records and omitting context. “The Motion to Withdraw is not based on a good-faith reevaluation of the evidence,” they wrote, “but rather a political shift within the District Attorney’s office to oppose resentencings generally, no matter how qualified a particular defendant may be.”
