In a shocking revelation in the California criminal justice system, prosecutors' notes from decades ago indicate a deliberate attempt to prevent Blacks and Jews from serving as jurors in capital cases, Scripps News reports. Notes like, "Banker, Jew?" and "I liked him better than any other Jew but no way," were discovered in jury selection notes from the case of Ernest Dykes, who was sentenced to death in 1995. Brian Pomerantz is a defense attorney representing Dykes and two more clients on death row from Alameda County. "This is one of the biggest discoveries of systemic racism that we've ever seen. Certainly with death row, it is the biggest we've seen," Pomerantz said. He says some prosecutors believe Jewish defendants are anti-capital punishment, while Black Americans are sympathetic to criminal defendants. A federal judge has ordered all California capital cases in which a defendant from Alameda County is still on death row to be reviewed.
The current Alameda County district attorney, who represents Oakland and much of the Bay Area, is reviewing all death penalty cases going back decades in which a defendant was convicted and is still on death row. DA Pamela Price says her office is reviewing 35 cases that go back more than 40 years. Pomerantz believes that's an undercount. "First of all, it's bigger than 35 cases. ... it's not practical to retry them all. It would probably bankrupt Oakland to retry them. It would be an expensive process, tie up the courts, it would take years to do. It would be a disaster," Pomerantz said. Generally, trial attorneys can strike jurors during jury selection without explaining their reasoning — what's known as a peremptory challenge — but even those strikes cannot be based on race or religion. "[There is] another county out of California where I believe they were striking Hispanic jurors. I have a case in Utah where I believe they were striking non-Mormon jurors. This is happening everywhere," Pomerantz added. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least 68 capital cases have been reversed due to jury selection discrimination.