Alameda County death sentences on hold
DA: Evidence suggests prosecutors illegally excluded Black, Jewish jurors in prior decades
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price put all 35 of her county’s death sentences on hold Monday and said there was evidence that prosecutors in a 30is year-old case had removed all Jewish and Black people from the jury.
“When you intentionally exclude any juror based on their race, their religion, their gender or any protected category, it violates the Constitution,” Price said at a news conference. “The evidence that we collected suggests plainly that many people did not receive a fair trial in Alameda County.”
She cited only one case, in which Ernest Dykes of Oakland was convicted in 1993 of murdering his landlady’s 9-year-old grandson, Lance Clark, and trying to murder landlady Bernice Clark during an attempted robbery. But Price said there was evidence that the same discriminatory conduct took place in “a number of cases” and “was not limited to one or two prosecutors.”
Price was acting at the direction of U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco, who hearing Dykes’ federal appeal, known as habeas corpus, after the state Supreme Court upheld his convictions and death sentence.
In a document filed Monday, Chhabria said Price’s office, “consistent with its legal and ethical obligations,” had shown him and Dykes’ lawyers notes from jury
selection from the prosecutors at Dykes’ trial.
“These notes — especially when considered in conjunction with evidence presented in other cases — constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases,” Chhabria wrote.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers are allowed to remove a number of prospective jurors — 20 in capital cases — without stating a reason, but are barred by law from doing so because of race, religion, ethnicity or gender.
Price, a former civil rights lawyer, took office in 2023 after a campaign in which she promised not to seek the death penalty or other sentences she considered excessive. Opponents have accused her of being soft on crime and have submitted enough signatures on petitions to place a recall election on the county ballot.
Ann-Kathryn Tria, a lawyer for Dykes, said defense attorneys are trying to reach an agreement with Price to resolve the case. She said Dykes, who was 20 at the time of the crimes, has expressed remorse for his actions.
“It’s always been denied by prosecutors, but (discrimination in jury selection) has been a huge issue in Alameda County for decades,” Tria said.
Tom Orloff, who served as the county’s district attorney from 1995 until he retired in 2009, said Monday he was unfamiliar with details of Dykes’ case, which was tried before he took office. But he said Price did not need to put all 35 cases on hold.
“There is a whole legal process for assessing those issues, which she apparently wishes to ignore,” Orloff said, referring to post-appellate review in habeas corpus proceedings.
Similar allegations of improper juror challenges were raised in another Alameda County case in 2003 when a former prosecutor, Jack Quatman, said removal of Jews and African American women from death penalty juries had been standard practice in the office in 1987, when he was the lead prosecutor in the case of Fred Freeman.
Quatman said in a declaration that the trial judge, Stanley Golde, a former prosecutor who was Jewish, had called him into his chambers during jury selection and asked why he hadn’t removed a Jewish person from the jury pool, since Jews would never vote for a death sentence. Quatman said he used three of his challenges to remove Jews from the jury, which convicted Freeman and sentenced him to death.
But the state Supreme Court upheld Freeman’s death sentence after ordering fact-finding hearings before another judge, who called Quatman “dishonest.” Freeman, convicted of murder during a 1984 armed robbery, died of natural causes in 2009 at age 69.