Document Category: Racial Justice Act

This appellate brief argues that mandatory LWOP for an 18-year-old Latine individual violates the California Constitution because LWOP is disproportionately imposed on young people of color. Citing social science and sentencing data, the brief explains how racial stereotypes shape extreme sentencing outcomes that disproportionately expose young Black and Latine people to LWOP. The brief also raises California Racial Justice Act claims based on racially coded gang evidence and courtroom language, citing research on implicit bias, dehumanization, anti-Latine stereotypes, and the historical conflation of Latine identity with gangs and criminality. It challenges testimony treating Spanish, baggy clothes, tattoos, and Latine ethnicity as gang indicators, as well as judicial references to “mad dogging” and “savages.”

Pages 17-24 and 32-33 collect research and argue that descriptive statistics – statistical analyses that do not control for other factors – can establish the possibility of racial bias and trigger an evidentiary hearing under the California Racial Justice Act and that regression analyses that account for potential confounding variables provide strong evidence of racial bias under the Act without the need to interrogate individual motives or impacts.

This motion incorporates studies of implicit bias and racially discriminatory policing in San Diego. Studies referenced describe disparities in how police speak to drivers of different races as well as disparities in post-stop outcomes.