FCL NEWSLETTER -- May, 2000

Suddenly the news is alive with stories reminding us that justice in California is neither tamper-proof nor color-blind.

A stunning admission of the problem came from Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush. For several years, the commissioner has received the benefits of favorable publicity from a multi-million dollar private earthquake recovery fund that he established with donations in lieu of fines from the companies he regulates. When the State Assembly began looking into his actions, he defended short-circuiting the regulatory system by pointing out that insurance companies have the financial power to delay for decades any disciplinary actions he might try to take against them.

A similar admission emerged two years ago when the State Senate inquired about the efforts of the Department of Corrections to discipline guards who abuse or kill prisoners. The story then was that a well-funded, largely white union had been able to prevent dismissal of individual guards, and it was actually the whistle-blowers who ended up being disciplined. So far, the guards have been able to obtain acquittals from the rural courts deciding their criminal cases.

Remedies for abuses of wealth and power can seem tardy and inadequate. It took Black Panther Geronimo Pratt 30 years to recover $4.5 million in compensation after the County of Los Angeles and the FBI imprisoned him on a murder charge. It turned out he was hundreds of miles away when the killing occurred. Now the City of Los Angeles is trying to decide how to pay millions of dollars in damages to the dozens of people who were unlawfully imprisoned as a result of lies and conspiracies by members of its police department.

The concern that people without resources and connections, particularly people of color, appear to get sub-standard justice in California is not new. Often a person's race causes them to fit a law enforcement officer's profile of an offender; once so identified, the presumption of innocence seems to disappear. An extended study by the State Judicial Council on racial bias in the courts cited the following testimony in summarizing the public perception:

"Citizens who are victimized on the streets by illegal stops, detentions, searches, and seizures, arrests and abuse, are later taken to our courts, hoping for fair hearings, only to find they are victimized again by our judges, who refuse to apply the same standard of credibility to police officers as those that are applied to others. Lies to justify the admissibility of evidence are commonplace and repeatedly accepted. Objections to the contrary are ignored. All of this is done in the name of justice, law, and order." (p. 59, Final Report of the California Judicial Council Advisory Committee on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts, 1997.)

The perception seems confirmed by a new report from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency that documents a national tendency to incarcerate black youth at significantly higher rates than whites. The report describes systemic decision points at which African American youth are treated differently, including the decision to arrest rather than release to a parent's custody, to try an offender as an adult rather than in juvenile court, and to imprison rather than use an alternative to incarceration as a penalty. This analysis may help explain why black males, who constitute only 3.7% of the state's population, occupy nearly 33% of all prison beds.

How Widespread is the Racial Profiling Problem?

Law abiding people of color who have for years been subjected to harassing traffic stops by officers looking to uncover criminal activity are discovering that the practice is widely acknowledged, although played down by police. SB 1389 (Kevin Murray, D., Culver City) is the third bill in three years that sought to obtain data about traffic stops to verify whether racial characteristics of the driver are a factor in police activity.

The measure has encountered stiff resistance from police and sheriffs who prefer to regard the problem as one of management and training. Governors Wilson and Davis both vetoed bills calling for "driving while black" statistical studies on grounds of cost, but the City of San Jose, in cooperation with ethnic community leadership, quickly came up with preliminary data.

As is usually the case with statistical studies, San Jose's data may raise as many questions as it answers. African-Americans and Latinos, comprising an estimated 35% of the overall population, account for about 50% of traffic stops. While this could be suggestive of a problem, the patterns of traffic stops in predominantly white areas of the city fail to show that black motorists are receiving undue attention in those neighborhoods.

The study will continue, and it has convinced some other police agencies to follow suit. Perhaps the best outcome of San Jose's study seems to be that it has been a point of dialogue with ethnic community leaders, and evidence that the police are sincerely interested in eliminating racial profiling. Other law enforcement agencies should take note, and support vigorous investigations of racial profiling.

How Many Prisoners Are Innocent?

Studying results from forensic laboratories suggests that DNA testing excludes the primary suspect in roughly 20 percent of cases. While this doesn't mean that 20% of the people now in our jails and prisons are innocent, it does suggest that a significant proportion of suspects didn't commit the charged offense, and that issues of bias and poverty can be highly prejudicial. In a state the size of California, if plea bargaining, or other flaws in the judicial process fail to exclude the innocent from punishment, the number of wrongfully imprisoned people may be substantial.

Senator John Burton (D., San Francisco) has introduced SB 1342 to give defendants convicted in criminal cases the right to request DNA testing on evidence relevant to their conviction if the evidence or technology for testing was not available at the time of trial. The need for this bill is illustrated by the case of Herman Atkins originally prosecuted in Riverside County and released from prison after twelve years, three of which were spent in convincing the prosecutor and court to agree to a test of the biological evidence recovered from the victim, who had fingered Atkins as her attacker. .

What Can You Do?

Too often, leaders who are often themselves treated like royalty, are tempted to pay lip-service to equality. They need to have your letters, enclosing copies of relevant news items, to remind them that you care about respectful treatment of all people by government representatives. Confidence in our system of justice requires not only that it be prompt and public, but that it be color-blind and classless. No one wants a system in which the offender's penalty is dictated by the color of his skin or how much money he has to defend himself.

by Steve Birdlebough

As the clock ticks toward the mid-May revision of the state's income projections for the upcoming fiscal year, elected officials are floating dozens of schemes to spend the anticipated surplus, which some believe may be as much as $11 billion. Two proposals of particular interest to FCL Newsletter readers have been set forth by State Treasurer Phil Angelides and Assembly Member Sarah Reyes (D., Fresno).

The treasurer asked a senate budget subcommittee in April for a one-time $100 million increase to the State Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program. The program is currently authorized to provide $50 million in credits.

Angelides emphasized that his proposal would supplement and not replace other pending funding increases, such as a $100 million augmentation to the Multifamily Housing Program. He claimed he would use the tax credit program both to expand the number of projects supported with state credits and to encourage projects that would serve more lower income households. Angelides noted that last year 5,000 units of housing were produced with state and federal low income housing tax credits, but at current levels only one in five eligible projects can be funded. The Treasurer's proposal has been incorporated into AB 1080 (Antonio Villaraigosa, D., Los Angeles),

Assembly Member Sarah Reyes has proposed more than $400 million in farmworker assistance covering everything from increased funding for migrant education to an expansion of health programs for migrant farmworkers and their families. The Fresno Democrat also proposed a tax rebate of $100 per farmworker in lieu of a paid holiday honoring Ceasar Chavez.

Among other things, the proposals would: