A 73-year-old Black man is suing Alameda County and its District Attorney’s Office for what he argues was an unconstitutional jury selection process that helped to ensure his conviction 35 years ago.
Curtis Lee Ervin, who now lives in Richmond, was convicted in 1991 in a murder-for-hire plot that left another man’s wife, Carlene McDonald, dead, with her body dumped in Berkeley’s Tilden Park in 1986. The trial, one of the longest in Alameda County history, ended with Ervin and another man sentenced to death.
Ervin long maintained his innocence, saying that the other man, Robert McDonald, did the actual killing, though police said he had made some incriminating statements linking him to the crime at the time of his arrest…