Test cases for a new California law primed the state for exactly how a justice system based on critical race theory would look.
The Golden State’s radical push for reparations may have garnered most of the spotlight since Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) approved the formation of a task force in 2020. However, it was the Racial Justice Act passed the same year that set off alarm bells as amendments expanded who could advance race-based challenges to their convictions.
Writing for City Journal, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald argued, “California is about to demonstrate what a world constructed from the tenets of critical race studies looks like.”
“Starting this year, the RJA allows anyone serving time in California prison or jail for a felony to challenge his conviction and sentencing retroactively on the ground of systemic racial bias,” she detailed.
“The act establishes an infinite regress of bias from which no escape is possible. If a prosecutor tries to offer what the act calls ‘race-neutral reasons’ (such as criminal history) for either past prosecutions or the current one,” she explained, “those reasons can be challenged, in the words of the statute, as the product of ‘systemic and institutional racial bias, racial profiling, and historical patterns of racially biased policing and prosecution.’”
The Journal piece highlighted an example RJA claim upheld in the appellate court where, “‘Race expert’ Dante King testified that the officer’s use of the phrase ‘high-crime area’ in explaining his stop demonstrated ‘bias against people of color,” after a felon on federal probation was stopped and found to be illegally possessing a loaded firearm in his car.
“That same Dante King would assert in February 2024 that ‘white are psychopaths [whose] behavior represents and underlying, biologically transmitted proclivity.’ Labeling whites ‘psychopaths’ does not demonstrate bias against people of whiteness, apparently,” the contributing editor noted.
In other words, the bill is a ticking time bomb. Serious offenders can allege bias merely by showing that a disproportionate number of those convicted of crimes in a county are minorities.
Here’s an example of the RJA in action. pic.twitter.com/NQr3Szrzfh
— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) May 20, 2024
As it currently stood, the law allowed those currently incarcerated to challenge their convictions. Come 2025, felons convicted in 2015 or after were eligible and by 2026 anyone who had served their sentence for a felony conviction could file a challenge.
“Racial justice advocates are distributing material in prisons to tutor convicts on bringing RJA actions,” detailed Mac Donald.
Further compounding the issue, an April 2024 court ruling from the Superior Court of Orange County determined a judge could be disqualified from adjudicating RJA motions for challenging claims of systemic racism in the justice system. In other words, while the state ignored Supreme Court precedent over implicit bias, as determined in the 1987 case McClesky v. Kemp that asserted bias had to be shown against the individual, not a group, for the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to be invoked, leftist California judges were removing any impediments to their own judicial activism.
Matters were worse still for prosecutors in the state who weren’t committed to the soft-on-crime agenda as the California legislature had appropriated $5 million to the Office of the State Public Defender in 2023 toward RJA claims. “No money was allocated to district attorneys’ offices to defend against those claims.”
The scope of the RJA’s extent was provided by the leftist group, The Prosecutors Alliance of California, which contended that over 90 percent of incarcerated adults with gang enhancements were “Black and Latinx.”
As at least one user posited, “What could possibly go wrong?”
What could possibly go wrong?
— Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) May 20, 2024
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Author: Kevin Haggerty
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