Posted on Aug 31, 2026
A first-of-its-kind lawsuit challenging California’s death penalty on systemic racial grounds has cleared an initial hurdle at the California Supreme Court and is now headed to an evidentiary hearing in Sacramento Superior Court, according to reporting from the Washington Post. The suit, filed by the ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, the Equal Justice Society, and the Office of the State Public Defender, argues that California’s capital punishment statute is unconstitutional because of the racial disparities in how it operates statewide.
“We are not saying the death penalty is inherently racist. We are saying the way our death penalty is currently being applied has unacceptable racial disparities.”
According to the studies cited in the challenge to the state’s death penalty system, Black defendants in California have been up to 8.7 times more likely, and Latino defendants up to 6.2 times more likely to receive death sentences than other defendants convicted of comparable murders. Defendants of any race were up to 8.8 times more likely to be sentenced to death when at least one victim was white.
The Death Penalty Information Center has documented that race?—?of both defendants and victims?—?remains among the most persistent and well-established sources of arbitrariness in the U.S. death penalty system. Research shows that roughly three-quarters of death sentences nationally involve white victims, even though white people make up only about half of all homicide victims. Historically, dozens of independent academic studies over four decades have found the same pattern: a white-victim case is significantly more likely to end in a death sentence than a case with a victim of color.
The petition filed in California is notable because it uses a body of evidence to establish racial arbitrariness that the U.S. Supreme Court foreclosed nearly 40 years ago. In McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), the Court held that statistical evidence of racial disparity, even the well-documented Baldus study, was not enough to prove unconstitutional discrimination without evidence of intentional bias in the individual case.
“Every day that this system is in place this way, yielding these results, is another day that folks in California are subject to racial prejudice that is legitimized by this system…That is part of the reason for our urgency.”
California’s Racial Justice Act, signed in 2020 and substantially strengthened in 2025, was written explicitly as a state-level answer to McCleskey, allowing defendants to rely on statistical patterns of disparity rather than proving intentional bias in their specific case. It has already given prisoners in California a pathway to relief, but as ACLU of Northern California’s Avi Frey told the Post, most of the roughly 600 people on California’s death row do not have attorneys capable of bringing that kind of challenge, and post-conviction litigation can take decades. The new petition is an attempt to secure systemic relief in a single proceeding rather than waiting for hundreds of individual claims to work their way through the courts.
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