New Alameda County DA changes course on historic death penalty resentencing

Alameda County’s new district attorney is rejecting her predecessor’s recommendations to resentence people on death row — recommendations triggered by a historic review of systemic prosecutorial misconduct.

Records obtained by CalMatters show at least four cases in which District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson has moved to withdraw resentencing motions filed under Pamela Price, who was recalled from office in November. 

Price launched the review roughly one year ago, after U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria mandated that her office investigate 35 death penalty cases for prosecutorial misconduct dating back to the 1980s. 

His order cited “strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases.”

Price ultimately recommended resentencing 30 people, the majority people of color, after finding that their constitutional rights had been violated. Of those, 20 people have had their day in court and were resentenced to terms less than death under Alameda County Superior Court Judge Thomas Stevens. 

But that effort came to a halt when Price was ousted. Her resentencing team was disbanded, according to court records and interviews with former staffers. And the 10 resentencing recommendations awaiting a ruling were reassigned to Alameda County Superior Court Judge Armando Pastran, a former prosecutor.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors appointed Jones Dickson, a former judge, to her post in February. Her office began filing motions to withdraw recommendations less than two months later, contending that Price and her team made flawed legal arguments and failed to sufficiently contact victims and their family members. 

The “motion is based on a substantive reevaluation of the facts of the case, legal analysis…consideration of petitioner’s prior crimes, and new information about the victims’ wishes,” wrote deputy district attorney Emily Tienken in one of the filings. 

The decision to reverse course signals one of the first major policy changes the office has adopted since Price’s departure. 

“It’s absolutely disgraceful,” said Michael Collins, senior director at Color of Change, a racial justice organization that called on the Attorney General’s Office to support Price’s review and launch its own investigation. “It’s scandalous that this has happened and now they’re trying to bury the cases. The people whose lives were destroyed — the people who were given unconstitutional trials are not getting any indemnification.”

In an interview with CalMatters, Price said her office was looking to achieve justice and it was not driven by politics.

“It was very disturbing,” said Price. “If this is the practice and you’re doing it in these types of cases, what’s to say you’re not doing it in other types of cases as well? So our concern was that we had a huge task ahead of us.” 

The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for an interview for  this story. At a press conference marking her first 100 days in office, Jones Dickson on Thursday did not directly answer a question about her stance on the death penalty cases.

“I don’t have a plan to specifically review any death penalty cases that are pending,” she said. “We are already in the midst of doing that. It looks like the prior administration started that process and so there are cases that are still pending that we’re reviewing and evaluating and filing motions on and doing the things that lawyers do. But I don’t have a policy at this point regarding choosing cases to pull for resentencing.” 

Jonathan Raven, an executive at the California District Attorneys Association, said not every district attorney is going to agree on a specific case.

“Any district attorney is always going to review policies and practices, and review the decisions of the prior district attorney, which I think is what the voters would want – or certainly, the board of supervisors,” he said.

Disparities in death penalty sentences

Decades of research has documented racial bias in the application of the death penalty. In a brief submitted to the California Supreme Court challenging the administration of the state’s death penalty scheme, legal advocacy organizations wrote that Black and Latino defendants are roughly six to nine times more likely to be sentenced to death than all other defendants. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom cited that legacy when he suspended the death penalty in California six years ago. But voters have consistently upheld the death penalty as a policy, and almost 600 people incarcerated in state prisons have been sentenced to death.

Allegations of racially discriminatory jury selection practices in Alameda County were first raised in 2005 by a former prosecutor in a sworn declaration. Roughly 20 years later, Price announced that her office had uncovered evidence of those violations. 

Jury selection notes disclosed by Price’s office revealed that past Alameda County prosecutors had been illegally tracking and striking potential jurors on the basis of race and religion for decades. 

In one instance, prosecutors described a prospective Black female juror as a “Short, Fat, Troll.” Prosecutors wrote of another prospective juror, “I liked him better than any other Jew but no way.”

Those findings served as the basis for Judge Chhabria’s order and quickly became priority for Price’s team, which had already been resentencing many other types of cases. According to Price and former staffers, the office assembled a team of victim witness advocates who contacted all of the survivors they were able to identify. 

Appeal reached California Supreme Court

The team spent months reviewing cases, including the conviction of Grayland Winbush. Winbush, a Black man, was sentenced to death in 2003 following the murder of Erika Beeson during a robbery. He was 19 at the time of the crime. In court filings, attorneys for Winbush argued that his constitutional rights were violated when prosecutors removed all Black prospective jurors and relied on racial stereotypes to characterize him as a superpredator. 

In January, Price’s office recommended that he be resentenced to 30 years to life, acknowledging that his case had “become a reference point in discussions of jury selection misconduct.” In return, Winbush agreed that he would no longer continue appealing his sentence. But roughly three months later, Jones Dickson withdrew the original recommendation “based on carefully considered victim impact and up-to-date legal analysis.” 

Attorneys for Winbush held that the office has no factual or legal ground to revoke its recommendation, maintaining that “withdrawing a recommendation on a whim or based on ‘a change in the political winds’” is not valid.

The motion “perpetuates, rather than confronts and remedies, the widespread race-based misconduct that led a federal judge to direct the office to review its death penalty cases,” wrote appellate defense attorney Rebecca Jones. “The original resentencing petition filed by the (Alameda County District Attorney’s Office) is a piece of its attempt to redress systemic bias reflected by the jury selection in Mr. Winbush’s case.”

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Pastran will decide whether to grant Jones Dickson’s revocation of Winbush’s resentencing recommendation in the months ahead. 

In another case, Jones Dickson is pulling the resentencing recommendation for Giles Albert Nadey, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2000 for murdering a young woman. 

The case came up for argument in the California Supreme Court last year, around the same time that Price’s office had surfaced evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, but did not consider that evidence and ultimately upheld the death sentence.

In a divided opinion, the court looked at a prosecutor’s decision to dismiss five of six Black women from Nadey’s jury pool and determined the deputy district attorney had valid reasons to strike them, such as his perceptions of their political leanings. 

“We conclude in each instance the prosecutor’s reasons were inherently plausible and supported,” the court ruled in a 5-2 decision, citing evidence from jury questionnaires and the prosecutor’s questioning of the stricken jurors.

In a dissent, Justice Goodwin Liu referred to the federal court ruling that directed Price to review death penalty cases. The “decision is particularly jarring given what has come to light in federal court regarding capital jury selection in Alameda County around the time that Nadey was tried,” Liu wrote.

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.