The Supreme Court today affirms the death sentence in People v. Wilson for the 2000 murder or attempted murder of three taxi drivers in Los Angeles and San Bernardino. It’s a 5-2 vote with the disagreement about whether the appeal should even be decided now or whether it should be stayed and the case remanded to the superior court for adjudication of claims under the California Racial Justice Act (here and here). The RJA discussion covers 32 of the majority opinion’s 115 pages; the dissent is 26 pages.
The RJA prohibits convictions and sentences sought or imposed “on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.” (Pen. Code section 745.) The prohibited bias can be by almost anyone involved in a criminal case — the judge, an attorney, a law enforcement officer, an expert witness, or a juror. An RJA violation requires vacation of a conviction or sentence, depending on the type of violation, and makes the defendant ineligible for the death penalty. A defendant may move to stay an appeal from their sentence “and request remand to the superior court to file a motion [under the RJA].”
The defendant is seeking RJA relief based on allegations, as described in the court’s opinion, that (1) “during penalty phase deliberations one of the jurors referred to mitigating evidence of abuse and neglect in Wilson’s background as ‘ “cultural” ’ ” and argued “many children in Black families were raised under similar conditions and did not go on to commit murder” and that (2) “there are significant racial disparities in both charging and sentencing in San Bernardino, his county of conviction.”
The court’s opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger states the defendant “seeks to raise a plausible RJA claim,” but denies his stay-and-remand motion. It says he can “simultaneously pursu[e] relief through a direct appeal and relief in the superior court through a petition for writ of habeas corpus.”
The opinion states an RJA stay and remand is neither “categorically unavailable” nor does the RJA “automatically authorize a stay and remand in all pending criminal appeals in which colorable RJA claims may be raised on evidence that has not yet been developed.” Nonetheless, there now seems to be a presumption against the procedure. Characterizing a stay and remand as “a significant departure from the usual process of adjudication [that] carries with it significant risks of disruption and delay,” the court says it “may be necessary to employ the procedure in some cases to permit the timely and effective development of extrarecord RJA claims in superior court” and it holds the defendant “has not shown that delaying the resolution of this appeal is necessary to afford him a full, fair, and timely opportunity to litigate his RJA claims in superior court.”
Justice Kelli Evans, joined by Justice Goodwin Liu, dissents on the RJA issue, saying she would grant the stay-and-remand motion or at least conditionally affirm the death sentence and order a remand. She claims good cause for a stay and remand is established simply by “set[ing] forth nonfrivolous RJA claims that require further factual development.” Justice Evans writes that “[t]he majority supplants the Legislature’s demand to swiftly rid the criminal justice system of racism with a novel and unnecessary RJA-specific habeas path that, as the Legislature was well aware, is riddled with delay because of the difficulty of appointing habeas counsel and processing capital habeas claims.”
On the merits of the appeal, the court rejects a number of arguments, including several concerning eyewitness identifications. Regarding one of those arguments, the court finds it “questionable whether the trial court appropriately exercised its discretion” in excluding evidence to impeach a police officer who was involved in one or two photo lineups, but found any error in doing so to be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The Supreme Court court also found to be not prejudicial, but under the lower “reasonable probability” standard, a trial court error in excluding evidence to impeach another witness.
We’re probably just at the beginning of Supreme Court RJA opinions. In June, we wrote: “The RJA (here and here) is a good candidate to be the next big thing on the court’s docket. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero has already identified it as legislation that is ‘impacting [the court’s] workflow.’ (See, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here.)” Moreover, despite the court’s detailed discussion of the RJA today, its opinion deals only with the stay-and-remand procedure and, even as to that, it identifies various issues that are left unresolved.
[Update: Another 5-2 divide on the Racial Justice Act in a death penalty affirmance.]