Judge finds DA’S practices are racist, dismisses charges in case
MARTINEZ — In a firstof-its kind ruling statewide, a judge has dismissed gang charges against four Bay Area men under the Racial Justice Act, ruling that Contra Costa prosecutors have disproportionately targeted Black people with enhancements that open the door for sentences of life without parole or death.
It is a case already under heavy scrutiny because two of the defendants were directly referenced in racist and braggadocious text messages sent by Antioch police officers who investigated their alleged crimes. The texts — part of a much larger scandal involving racism, alleged civil rights violations, and dozens of impugned officers — made light of injuring the men during their arrests and referred to Black people in explicitly racist ways.
Earlier this week, county prosecutors formally conceded that the racist texts by Antioch officers constituted a separate violation of the Racial Justice Act, and said they’ll debate the appropriate legal remedy before Goldstein at a later date.
But Friday’s ruling by Judge David Goldstein did not take into consideration any of the racist texts. Rather, Goldstein looked solely at filing practices of the Contra Costa
District Attorney’s office, dating back a decade, and found ample evidence of a “significant statistical disparity” showing Black people are more often targeted with special circumstances gang charges. It is a ruling that calls into question dozens of other criminal cases over the past 10 years, involving some of the most serious charges on the books.
In making his decision, Goldstein relied on data that both prosecutors and defense attorneys largely agreed upon, which showed that Black people were either 8 percent or 6 percent more likely to be charged with special circumstance gang enhancements than people who weren’t Black. A data pool of 89 defendants — 48 of whom were Black — showed that Black people faced such enhancements 62 percent of the time, compared to roughly 53 percent for the the nonblack defendants. County prosecutors urged Goldstein to use a 91-defendant data pool, which eased the margins but still showed a clear racial disparity, Goldstein said.
“I assure everyone that I don’t take this decision lightly in any way,”
Goldstein said in court Friday.
Goldstein threw out special circumstances enhancements against four men — Eric Windom, Terryon Pugh, Keyshawn Mcgee, and Trent Allen, — who are accused of fatally shooting a man to benefit an Oakland gang. But his ruling does not affect the underlying murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy counts.
Friday marks the second time that prosecutors in
Contra Costa County have made California history by violating the Racial Justice Act, a new state law intended to weed out racism in the superior courts.
Last October, Judge Clare Maier ruled that a county prosecutor used “racially coded language” that “evoked racial stereotypes of African American men” during a two-defendant murder trial and threw out murder convictions for both men.
Maier’s ruling dealt specifically with a portion of the act that refers to a prosecution’s statements during trial, while Goldstein’s ruling cited a different subsection that covers an entire DA office’s charging practices.
Evan Kuluk, a lawyer with the county’s Alternate Defender’s Office, was an attorney of record in both cases. In a written statement to this newspaper Kuluk noted that Goldstein found the Contra Costa DA’S office has no best practice guidelines in place to identify implicit bias in the way criminal cases are filed.
“The impact of today’s ruling is an acknowledgement that racial bias infects every stage of the criminal legal process,” Kuluk said.
For many defense attorneys in Contra Costa, Friday’s ruling was seen as a vindication after years of calling on Contra Costa prosecutors to audit their own filing decisions. Diana Becton — the first woman and first Black person ever to serve as Contra Costa DA — partnered with the Vera Institute in 2019 in a project intended to identify implicit bias in the way cases are prosecuted, but has yet to release the underlying data publicly.
Chief Public Defender Ellen Mcdonnell said Goldstein’s ruling “drives home the unfair charging practices that too often result from the role of implicit bias in our legal system.”
“Testimony in this case demonstrates that the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office does not have policies, procedures, or guidelines for imposing life without parole enhancements, which causes implicit bias to influence charging decisions,” Mcdonnell said in an email to reporters. “This has a disparate and damaging impact on Black people and leads to the dramatic overrepresentation of black people in our county’s criminal legal system.”
An hour after Goldstein’s ruling, demonstrators took to the streets of Martinez to protest the Antioch police department in a march that started downtown and ended at the Wakefield Taylor Courthouse, a few feet from where a Black Lives Matter mural was defaced in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Participants included several plaintiffs in a recently filed civil suit intended to secure federal oversight of the Antioch police department, as well as Antioch’s mayor, who has called for all the officers who sent racist texts to be fired.