A look at violations of due process rights, in this case the right to a jury of one's peers which is located in the 6th Amendment.
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A jury was being chosen for a murder trial nearly three decades ago in California. The state was seeking a death sentence for Ernest Dykes, who had been charged with killing a 9-year-old boy during a robbery in Oakland.
“I liked him better than any other Jew but no way.”
Other notes about prospective jurors bore evidence of similar prejudice:
“Banker. Jew?” read one.
“Jew? Yes,” read another.
The notes — just handwritten scribbles — were discovered recently in an internal case file from the 1990s when Mr. Dykes was convicted of murder and sent to death row. A federal judge who is overseeing settlement talks as part of an appeal by Mr. Dykes told the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to conduct a top-to-bottom search for any additional documents, and that search turned up the notes, which are now in the hands of the judge.
The notes offered a startling glimpse into a practice that some defense lawyers long suspected was going on, and that a former prosecutor had alleged was common in Alameda County — prosecutors seeking to exclude people of certain faiths, races or genders.
Now, Mr. Dykes, 51, and perhaps others on death row in California as well, may have their convictions tossed out and be granted new trials. The federal judge weighing his appeal has ordered a review of all California capital cases in which a defendant from Alameda County is still on death row. The county includes Oakland, Berkeley and a host of other Bay Area communities.
The inquiry, which may involve as many as 35 cases from as far back as 1977, is just getting underway. But the district attorney’s office says it has already found evidence that the discriminatory practice was widespread for decades and involved numerous prosecutors.
“When you intentionally exclude people based on their race, their religion, their gender or any protected category, it violates the Constitution,” said Pamela Price, the Alameda district attorney and a former civil rights lawyer.
Legal scholars and critics of the death penalty say some prosecutors have long sought to exclude certain groups from serving as jurors in capital cases, even after the courts made clear that the practice was unconstitutional. Given the long history of racial injustice in the United States, Black jurors were presumed to be sympathetic to defendants, especially to Black defendants. And in the decades after the Holocaust, Jews were presumed to be against capital punishment.
