California’s Racial Justice Act Goes to Court

In a quartet of cases, the California Supreme Court last week made its first rulings interpreting the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), a landmark statute designed to eradicate racial bias from criminal prosecutions. Among its rulings, the court overturned a death sentence imposed after a prosecutor compared the defendant, a Black man, to a “Bengal tiger.” But otherwise, two justices argued, the court narrowed the law’s protections — raising the bar for RJA violations and allowing “harmless” violations to go unremedied — in ways contrary to the statute’s text and broad remedial purpose.