Passed in 2020, the CRJA “allows anyone serving time in a California prison or jail for a felony to challenge his conviction and sentencing retroactively on the ground of systemic racial bias.”
It used to be that if a felon wanted to claim he had been discriminated against by a cop, judge or prosecutor, he had to prove that the discrimination was leveled against him personally. Now, in our brave new post-CRJA world, all the felon has to do is cite “statistics purporting to show a pattern of bias in the past,” whether or not those statistics have anything to do with him, in order to challenge a conviction.
In other words, if felon “A”, who happens to be Black, is convicted of murder, he can appeal the conviction on the basis of the CRJA by citing statistics showing that Black people are convicted of murder in numbers far exceeding their percentage of the population in California. Never mind that such disparities arise because Black men actually do commit more than their fair share of murder. No, if the statistics exceed the percentage of Black Californians in the population, then it must be due to racism.
This is so outlandish, so insultingly contrary to intelligence, that one wonders how the CRJA ever managed to get through the Legislature and signed by Gov. Newsom. Originally introduced as Assembly Bill 2542, the law was amended one year later as AB 256, “The Racial Justice For All Act.” The law allows felons “to petition the court and seek relief if racial bias was proven to be present in their case.” How does the felon “prove” racial bias? Simple: by “meaningfully address[ing] the stark racial disparities in our sentencing history,” according to the bill’s author, Ash Kalra (D-San Jose). His purpose in crafting the CRJA, he explained, was “to not leave behind those with past criminal convictions and sentences that were tainted by institutionalized and implicit racial bias in our courts.”
It’s a bit like Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, arguing at Nuremberg that the charges against him ought to be dropped because only nazis were being tried. The Court, Ribbenstop might have alleged, was implicitly biased against nazis.
The CRJA is going to lead to hundreds or thousands of nuisance lawsuits and demands to be let go by felons throughout California, based on the most absurd pretenses. In one such case from 2022, the defendants, who had been convicted of first-degree murder, had their cases dismissed by a Contra Costa Superior Court judge, Clare Maier, on the basis of the CRJA. The two felons, who were “aspiring rappers,” had written lyrics of aggressive violence. Prosecutors introduced those lyrics into evidence, but the judge "conclude[d] that the use of defendants' rap lyrics and videos at their criminal trial…more likely than not triggered the jury's Implicit racial bias against African American men.” The two felons appealed their murder conviction under the CRJA, and their defense lawyer successfully argued that the prosecution had used “racially discriminatory language at trial” by introducing their rap video. The prosecution, he alleged, showed “implicit bias” against rap lyricists and showed a lack of understanding of “rap history, culture and the use of rap lyrics.” The particular lyrics in the defendants’ rap song included “pistol whip.” The two men, whose guilt in the murder no one doubted, demanded a retrial.
If we’ve reached the point where powerful evidence in criminal cases can’t even be introduced in court because prosecutors fear the CRJA, then our civilization is even closer to disintegration than you think. The CRJA has nothing to do with “racial justice” and everything to do with giving career criminals a get-out-of-jail free card by preventing a defendant’s prior history from consideration by a jury. CRJA is thus another example of cancel culture by the wokes, who hate for the public to have information that is embarrassing to them or to their clients. It should be renamed the California Racial Grievance Act and described as what it is: a woke campaign to excuse criminality by people of color by any means necessary.
Steve Heimoff