Did Contra Costa County* District Lawyer Diana Becton “take a dive” when her workplace was accused of discriminatory charging practices? Ron Matthias, retired Senior Asst. AG, has this op-ed within the San Jose Mercury Information.
Because of the Contra Costa district legal professional’s puzzling refusal to adequately defend her workplace in opposition to 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 court docket ruling sustaining it’s going to depart knowledgeable observers with the nagging suspicion that she’s proud of the end result. She may use the ruling as a handy excuse for by no means once more searching for applicable fees in opposition to hardcore gang members and for dropping fees in opposition to some who have already got been convicted.
Beneath 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 assist a “particular circumstance” subjecting him to a no-parole life sentence and even the loss of life penalty. In both occasion, the connection have to be charged and proved.
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The choice at concern arose beneath California’s misnamed and poorly written Racial Justice Act. The header language of PC §745(a) states the laudable aim of eliminating discriminatory prosecution and sentencing. As regular, the satan is within the particulars. Paragraph (a)(3) units forth this definition of a violation:
(3) The defendant was charged or convicted of a extra critical offense than defendants of different races, ethnicities, or nationwide origins who commit related offenses and are equally located, and the proof establishes that the prosecution extra continuously sought or obtained convictions for extra critical offenses in opposition to individuals who share the defendant’s race, ethnicity, or nationwide origin within the county the place the convictions have been sought or obtained.
Deciding who’s “equally located” is an enormously troublesome downside. However the Legislature simply makes use of the time period with out definition, successfully punting the difficulty to the courts. As for “extra continuously,” there’s a definition, form of:
(h)(1) “Extra continuously sought or obtained” or “extra continuously imposed” implies that statistical proof or mixture information exhibit a major distinction in searching for or acquiring convictions or in imposing sentences evaluating people who’ve dedicated related offenses and are equally located, and the prosecution can not set up race-neutral causes for the disparity.
What’s “important”? Is it the outdated p < .05 rule of thumb that will get extra weight than it deserves? Is it one thing else? Persevering with with Matthias’s article:
The proof provided to assist the defendants’ declare, nevertheless, doesn’t remotely maintain it. That the district legal professional did not level out as a lot to the court docket is past baffling. That she later hailed the court docket’s devastating ruling for “offsetting systemic racial disparities inside the felony justice system” and vowed to “assessment equally charged circumstances to advertise truthful 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 complicated 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 definitely not that “systemic racism” is at work.
The numbers alone can’t maintain the 4 defendants’ declare for a associated purpose: The legislation required these defendants to show (1) that the conduct alleged in opposition to them was much like 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 continuously than “equally located” non-Black defendants. The defendants didn’t achieve this. 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 an alternative, 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 accessible proof. Solely then can anybody draw reliably fact-based conclusions about whether or not race improperly influenced prosecutors’ charging discretion.
The court docket ought to have rejected the 4 defendants’ declare primarily based on failure of proof. However that failure can not 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, primarily based solely on correct issues akin to energy of proof, the defendants’ felony information, and the severity of the murders themselves — they inexplicably did not substantiate these vital assertions. Because the trial choose noticed, “there was no case-by-case evidentiary presentation concerning the underlying details that prosecutors thought of when deciding whether or not to cost or not cost the particular defendants in our historic information pool.”
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The reply to the query on the high of this submit seems to be sure, she took a dive.
* Contra Costa County is on the north finish of the jap aspect of San Francisco Bay. Its title means the “different coast” in Spanish, i.e., reverse SF.
Diana Becton was appointed District Lawyer to fill a emptiness. She was elected to a full time period after a Soros-based PAC dumped over one million {dollars} into her marketing campaign, an infinite quantity for a DA race in a medium sized county. See this text from 2022 within the Pleasanton Weekly.
