Because of the Contra Costa district legal professional’s puzzling refusal to adequately defend her workplace towards bogus allegations of racially discriminatory charging practices, the county’s most harmful gang-banging murderers will keep away from the punishment they deserve.
Diana Becton’s anemic response to each the cost of bias and a subsequent courtroom ruling sustaining it would go away knowledgeable observers with the nagging suspicion that she’s proud of the outcome. She may use the ruling as a handy excuse for by no means once more looking for applicable fees towards hardcore gang members and for dropping fees towards some who have already got been convicted.
Underneath California legislation, a gang-inspired assassin can see his sentence “enhanced” by 10 further years, and within the case of an particularly egregious homicide, the gang connection may help a “particular circumstance” subjecting him to a no-parole life sentence and even the dying penalty. In both occasion, the connection should be charged and proved.
From 2015 to 2022, Becton and her predecessor charged 91 individuals with gang-related murders. 4 defendants at present dealing with these fees lately claimed that the gang-related particular circumstance is utilized in a racially discriminatory method. Final month a trial decide agreed and struck the particular circumstance allegation charged towards the 4.
The proof provided to help the defendants’ declare, nonetheless, doesn’t remotely maintain it. That the district legal professional didn’t level out as a lot to the courtroom is past baffling. That she later hailed the courtroom’s devastating ruling for “offsetting systemic racial disparities inside the felony justice system” and vowed to “evaluation equally charged instances to advertise honest and equitable prosecution” is downright alarming.
Right here’s what the proof truly confirmed: Among the many 91 defendants charged from 2015-22 with gang-related murders, 48 are Black. Of these, 30 (62.5%) confronted the gang-related homicide particular circumstance; the opposite 18 confronted solely the 10-year enhancement. Of the 43 non-Black defendants, 24 (55.8%) have been charged with the particular circumstance; the opposite 19 confronted solely the additional 10 years.
As somebody whose 35-year profession as a prosecutor included appreciable expertise litigating advanced racial discrimination points, I acknowledge that this “disparity” — the distinction between 62.5% and 55.8% — is legally trivial. Certainly, if, over the identical seven-year interval, merely two extra non-Black defendants had been charged with the gang particular circumstance and two fewer Black defendants had not been so charged, the “disparity” wouldn’t simply disappear, it might be reversed. Merely put, a case or two right here and there proves nothing — and positively not that “systemic racism” is at work.
The numbers alone can’t maintain the 4 defendants’ declare for a associated cause: The legislation required these defendants to show (1) that the conduct alleged towards them was related to that of the 19 non-Black defendants who confronted solely the 10-year enhancement, and (2) that, over time and to a major diploma, Black gang-related murderers have been charged with the gang-related particular circumstance extra incessantly than “equally located” non-Black defendants. The defendants didn’t accomplish that. They didn’t even come shut.
The mere proven fact that completely different murderers killed for gang-related causes doesn’t set up “similarity” for these functions. As a substitute, figuring out similarity requires an individualized comparability between completely different defendants and their conduct that correctly takes under consideration different variables, akin to their felony histories, the viciousness and penalties of their murders, and the standard of obtainable proof. Solely then can anybody draw reliably fact-based conclusions about whether or not race improperly influenced prosecutors’ charging discretion.
The courtroom ought to have rejected the 4 defendants’ declare based mostly on failure of proof. However that failure can’t clarify the district legal professional’s personal failure to place the matter to relaxation with proof of her personal.
Though three deputy prosecutors testified that their charging is race-neutral — that’s, based mostly solely on correct issues akin to power of proof, the defendants’ felony data, and the severity of the murders themselves — they inexplicably didn’t substantiate these vital assertions. Because the trial decide noticed, “there was no case-by-case evidentiary presentation concerning the underlying info that prosecutors thought of when deciding whether or not to cost or not cost the precise defendants in our historic information pool.”
If the ruling is permitted to face — and it’s clear from Becton’s unwarranted reward for it that she won’t ask the next courtroom to right it — the county will face an elevated risk of extra frequent and extra extreme homicidal gang conduct.
Ron Matthias served as a Contra Costa County deputy district legal professional within the mid-Nineteen Eighties and retired in 2019 as a senior assistant state legal professional normal. For many of his 35 years as a prosecutor, he specialised in capital instances.
