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.
The lawsuit was filed against the state, meaning Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office is the named defendant. As a state lawmaker, AG Bonta once pushed to abolish the death penalty and has publicly acknowledged that California’s system has long produced racially disparate outcomes for defendants of color, particularly in cases with white victims. Rather than moving to dismiss the petition, AG Bonta’s office has said in court filings that it is taking the disparity claims seriously and is reviewing the methodology of the 15 studies the petitioners have cited. His office has called the statistical findings “extraordinarily disturbing” while stopping short of conceding that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.
District attorneys in several of the counties responsible for the largest share of California’s death row population have intervened, arguing AG Bonta’s office cannot adequately represent their interests. Riverside County, which accounts for roughly 15% of the state’s death row population, second only to Los Angeles County, has been the most vocal. Its appellate unit has argued that a systemic, statewide court order is the wrong vehicle to challenge the state’s death penalty, insisting that racial bias claims belong in individual post-conviction proceedings under the Racial Justice Act, rather than in a single, sweeping petition. Riverside County’s DA office wrote that “[p]etioners ask this Court to help them reach a goal that they could not achieve at the ballot box: abolition of capital punishment across California.” The office added that this lawsuit is part of a “political campaign filed before the wrong branch of government.” Riverside’s filings also dispute the underlying research itself, characterizing the disparity studies as “outdated, irrelevant and inaccurate.” San Bernardino County’s District Attorney’s office has raised similar objections.
As Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker told the Post, a favorable outcome in California could hand capital defense lawyers in other states — Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Oregon among them — a template for bringing systemic, state-constitutional challenges rather than relitigating race discrimination case by case. “You don’t need federal permission to litigate what state constitutions mean,” Prof. Steiker said, adding that “[t]he federal constitution is the floor, and the states can go beyond it. And that’s what this litigation is all about.”
Shortly after assuming office in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order and announced a moratorium on executions in the state, saying that the “death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure.” He explained that the death penalty “has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, Black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation…[while providing] no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent.” The last execution in California was that of Clarence Ray Allen in January 2006.
Katie Mettler, A novel challenge to California’s death penalty could resonate in other states, The Washington Post, August 22, 2026.
