Four Decades of Data Reveal California's Death Penalty is Riddled with Racial Bias

Forty years of data expose an alarming injustice: California's death penalty system is riddled with racial bias. That's why on April 9, 2024, the ACLU of Northern California along with a consortium of nationally renowned civil rights organizations filed an extraordinary writ petition in the Supreme Court of California challenging the state's death penalty statute as racially discriminatory and unconstitutional under the Equal Protection guarantees of the California Constitution.

An extraordinary writ is a special court order that asks a higher court to intervene in situations when normal legal processes aren't adequately expedient. In this case, the ACLU used this legal tool to ask the Supreme Court of California to directly assess the constitutionality of the entire death penalty system, rather than going through the typical appeals process that handles individual cases. This allows the court to look at broader patterns of racial discrimination across the entire criminal legal system. This is the first time a petition of this nature has been filed with the court.

The case is built on numerous statewide and county-level studies demonstrating that California applies the death penalty disproportionately to people of color, especially when the victim is white. A recent, rigorous statewide study found that Black people are up to 8.7 times as likely to be sentenced to death as similarly situated non-Black defendants, Latino people are up to 6.2 times as likely to be sentenced to death, and defendants of all races are up to 8.8 times as likely to be condemned to death when at least one of the victims in the case is white.

California's own Attorney General agreed that the statistical findings of racial bias presented in the petition are "profoundly disturbing," that petitioners' arguments are entitled to careful consideration by a judicial tribunal, and that the Court should appoint a special master to consider the evidence. The case has received substantial support through friend-of-the-court briefs from California judges, state legislators, prosecutors, and law school clinics, underscoring widespread recognition that racial disparities in California’s administration of the death penalty are real and intolerable.  

In September 2024, the California Supreme Court ordered an additional briefing which was completed in December 2024. Our petition is still pending, but the evidence is undeniable, and the path forward is clear: the California Supreme Court must act to end the shameful legacy of capital punishment as a tool of racial subjugation.