California courts must address the racial bias in death penalty sentencing

A guest commentary in CalMatters argues that California's courts can no longer avoid the question of racial bias in death penalty sentencing. Written by Loyola Marymount law professor Priscilla Ocen, the piece notes that every person sentenced to death in the state over the last five years has been Black or Latino, with the last white defendant sentenced in mid twenty twenty-one. Two years ago the Office of the State Public Defender and several civil rights groups filed a petition directly with the California Supreme Court, drawing on four decades of research that finds Black defendants up to eight times more likely, and Latino defendants up to six times more likely, to be sentenced to death than others. In May, the court allowed that challenge to move forward in Sacramento Superior Court. Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in twenty nineteen, citing uneven application of death sentences, but as CalMatters tells it, a moratorium can be undone by a future governor while a court ruling would settle the constitutional question. The commentary also points to the system's cost and paralysis: six billion dollars spent since nineteen seventy-eight, thirteen executions carried out, the last in two thousand six, and about seventy percent of the five hundred fifty people now on death row without an attorney for their appeals.

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