When Pamela Price was sworn in as Alameda County District Attorney in 2023, she promised a “reckoning” with the criminal legal system’s injustices, including police and prosecutorial misconduct. And she brought a new philosophy to the DA’s office, focusing on rehabilitation instead of punishment for youth, and reducing the use of prosecutorial tools like enhancements — additional charges that add time to defendants’ sentences.
Price’s agenda came to the fore last year when a federal judge overturned the death sentence of Curtis Ervin because Alameda County prosecutors had engaged in misconduct during his trial in 1991. Another man, Ernest Dykes, who was convicted of murder in 1995, was resentenced and freed from prison last year following the discovery of more evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.
In a ruling in Dykes’ case, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria wrote that there was “strong evidence” that, in prior decades, Alameda County prosecutors committed Batson violations — when prosecutors strike potential jurors based on race, gender, or ethnicity in violation of the 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection and due process. The prosecutors “were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases,” Chhabria wrote. Prosecutors’ notes on the jurors, reviewed by the court, showed that they sought to keep Black and Jewish people off of juries under the assumption that they were less likely to vote for a death sentence…