On October 13, 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the latest set of amendments to California’s Racial Justice Act (CRJA) into law, strengthening a groundbreaking piece of legislation that prohibits criminal convictions and sentences based on race, ethnicity, or national origin. Under this law, capitally convicted prisoners can pursue meaningful relief, beyond just the reversal of a death sentence, if the state is found to have violated these protections.
“With these clarifications of the California Racial Justice Act, the legislature and governor have sent a clear message to the courts: stop attempting to eviscerate the RJA and get serious about addressing racial bias in the criminal courts. The amendments signed into law this week makes unmistakably clear that Californians will not tolerate racism in our courts and that when racial bias occurs, it must be addressed.”
When California’s RJA was first passed in 2020, legislators expressed their intention for the law to be interpreted as a “rejection” of the 1987 United States Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a ruling which refused to accept powerful statistical disparities as evidence of racial discrimination and forced defendants to prove that the alleged racism or bias was purposeful. Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D‑San Jose), the CRJA’s primary author, said the law serves as a “countermeasure” to McCleskey, arguing that the decision “established an unreasonably high standard for victims of racism in the criminal legal system that is almost impossible to meet without direct proof that the racially discriminatory behavior was conscious, deliberate and targeted.” Under the CRJA, statistical evidence is enough for a defendant to bring a case.
The CRJA has been amended once before, in 2022, to make the law retroactive. The latest amendments to the CRJA clarify the minimum threshold a defendant must meet to bring a claim, expand eligibility for appointed counsel for indigent death-sentenced prisoners, make it easier for prisoners to obtain early discovery, and require courts to provide a remedy when a violation is found, potentially even dismissing the charges.
“Systemic racism and the white supremacy on which it is founded have remarkable powers of adaptation. When courts recognize only the most egregious, historic manifestations of racism, they allow present-day racism to go uncorrected.”
In remarks accompanying the latest amendments, the California legislature expressed concerns about court decisions that amounted to a “silent evisceration” of the CRJA. The legislature criticized California court decisions in CRJA cases as “misconstrue[ing] the statute to apply procedural barriers or otherwise impose impediments to relief, discordant with the legislative intent of the RJA, and improperly insulate convictions and sentences tainted by racial bias.” Courts were imposing “higher burdens than the Legislature intended to meet the thresholds to secure counsel and discovery.” The legislature also explicitly called out court decisions which failed to find RJA violations where state prosecutors had “invoked long-held biases about men of color preying on white women;” used “dehumanizing” language like “predator,” “monster,” “sociopath,” “terrorist,” “brute,” “thug,” “gangster,” “uncivilized,” “welfare queen,” “superpredator,” or “superhuman”; made racial slurs or “gratuitous references to gangs, tattoos, nicknames, or neighborhoods;” used coded words such as “ghetto,” “hood,” “baby mama,” or “pimp”; denigrated immigrants; evoked historical “fears” that people of color are “deceptive, manipulative, crime prone, or a present or future danger;” and “exaggerated the physical appearance and size of people of color.” In applying the CRJA, the legislature admonished, courts should “consider evidence of racism’s origins, insidious shifts, and current manifestations.”
The fully amended bill is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2026.
Sources: AB 1017.
