The following article “California’s Death Penalty Could End Over Claims That It’s Racist” appeared August 22nd in the Washington Post, and is written by Katie Mettler.

Excerpts appear below.

California’s defense attorneys for years saw their Black and Latino clients sent to death row at a rate much higher than other defendants accused of the same crimes.

The data showed that Black people were up to 8.7 times — and Latinos up to 6.2 times — more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted of similar murder charges, according to academic studies. And those of all races were up to 8.8 times more likely to be condemned when at least one of the victims was White.

So a coalition of civil rights groups in California decided to get creative, launching a novel lawsuit in state court saying the death penalty’s racial tilt violated the state constitution — despite a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision finding that disparity data alone did not mean capital punishment violated the federal Constitution.

It’s the first time a state’s death penalty statute has been challenged on systemic grounds untethered to an individual case, potentially paving a new legal pathway for capital punishment opponents in other states. If several more states abolish the death penalty, it would represent a significant shift in the national landscape, experts suggest.

The lawsuit, an extraordinary request called a petition for writ of mandate, has cleared an initial hurdle at the California Supreme Court and will now be litigated in a Sacramento. A lower-court judge there is scrutinizing whether racial disparity data in 15 empirical studies proves petitioners’ claim that, as written, California’s death penalty statute violates the equal protection and cruel and unusual punishment clauses of the state constitution.

“Every day that this system is in place in this way, yielding these results, is another day that folks in California are subject to racial prejudice that is legitimized by this system,” said Joseph Wong, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, one of the groups that filed the suit. “That is part of the reason for our urgency.”

Court filings from the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, say the state is taking the racial disparity claims seriously. Bonta’s office is now examining the methodology of the studies, the filings say, a process that will require expert opinions.

“Racial discrimination in the administration of a criminal justice system is unacceptable,” Bonta’s office wrote in court papers filed last week. “And in the Attorney General’s view, the statistical findings in the studies invoked by petitioners are extraordinarily disturbing.”

Yet nearly half of U.S. states have abolished capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and only about a dozen are actively carrying out executions. Last year, 40 percent of the nation’s executions took place in Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has broken several state records related to the death penalty.

You can read the full article “California’s Death Penalty Could End Over Claims That It’s Racist” at the Washington Post website.

Katie Mettler is a reporter covering justice policy, law enforcement and courts.