California takes a backseat to no state when it comes to coddling criminals. The state legislature spends an incredible amount of time figuring out how to lighten sentences, impede prosecutors, and lessen bail, all in the name of addressing the problem of "systemic racism."
Heather MacDonald, writing in the Wall Street Journal, documents a new law in California that only makes sense if you suspend belief in reality and embrace lunacy.
In essence, the California Racial Justice Act automatically assumes that since systemic racism colors everything in the criminal justice system, "every felon serving time in the state’s prisons and jails can now retroactively challenge his conviction and sentencing on the ground of systemic bias," as Ms. MacDonald puts it.
To prevail, an inmate doesn't need to "prove" anything in the traditional legal sense. Instead, it's a matter of "demonstrating bias" by statistically "proving" bias.
Court testimony now sounds like a critical race studies course. When a felon in San Francisco contested his arrest and prosecution for having a loaded handgun in his car, a “race expert” testified that the arresting officer’s use of the phrase “high crime area” demonstrated “bias against people of color.” The trial judge disagreed, but an appeals court reversed and allowed the felon’s claim to proceed. (Speaking of bias, that same expert, Dante King, asserted at the University of California, San Francisco, on Feb. 8 that “whites are psychopaths” whose “behavior represents an underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity.”)
Yikes.
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That's just a mild example of the problems with this act. An appellate court recently ruled that a police officer can be guilty of "implicit bias against black drivers even if he doesn’t know the race of the driver he stops."
This is just the beginning.
The statute abandons the rule of comparing like to like. If a defense expert seeks to show that defendants from one racial group were sentenced more harshly in the past than defendants of other races, he can ignore criminal history in composing the comparison groups. He can ignore the heinousness of the crimes committed by the two groups. As long as they were charged under a similar statute, they will be deemed sufficiently comparable to build a case for prosecutorial racism.
This is what happens when the legal system is hijacked by radicals who have discovered that using the idea of "disparate outcomes" based solely on race and no other factors can overturn the entire concept of justice.
A case from Contra Costa County last year shows the snowballing potential of the Racial Justice Act. A judge found that four black gang members who had committed murder as part of a bloody feud between two Oakland gangs had been improperly sentenced to life in prison without parole. That conclusion wasn’t based on flaws in the four defendants’ trials, but simply on an alleged historical pattern of sentencing bias toward black gang murderers. The black comparison group in the case was made up of 30 black defendants who had also committed gang murder in Contra Costa County from 2015 to 2022 and who had also received life without parole. All 30 can now sue to erase those sentences.
"There is no clear way out of the presumption of racial guilt," MacDonald writes. And that's a feature, not a bug of this law.
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