Legal battles over tainted death penalty cases continue in Alameda County

When Pamela Worth was sworn in as Alameda County District Lawyer in 2023, she promised a “reckoning” with the legal authorized system’s injustices, together with police and prosecutorial misconduct. And he or she introduced a brand new philosophy to the DA’s workplace, specializing in rehabilitation as a substitute of punishment for youth, and decreasing using prosecutorial instruments like enhancements — extra costs that add time to defendants’ sentences. 

Worth’s agenda got here to the fore final 12 months when a federal decide overturned the loss of life sentence of Curtis Ervin as a result of Alameda County prosecutors had engaged in misconduct throughout his trial in 1991. One other man, Ernest Dykes, who was convicted of homicide in 1995, was resentenced and free of jail final 12 months following the invention of extra proof of prosecutorial misconduct.

The resentencing motions filed by Worth’s workplace have been anchored not solely in Chhabria’s order and the Batson case, which the Supreme Court docket determined in 1986, but additionally in a 2020 state regulation, the Racial Justice Act, that seeks to eradicate racial disparities within the legal authorized system. In passing the Racial Justice Act, the legislature acknowledged that California’s courts have been shaped by systemically racist options for many years, with Black folks, Latinos, and different defendants of colour disproportionately charged with extra severe crimes, together with homicide, and sentenced to loss of life at increased charges.

The regulation’s textual content additionally acknowledged that as incarcerated folks’s danger of committing new crimes drops considerably after age 40, prolonged jail phrases don’t scale back crime. The regulation allowed Worth to ask a decide to resentence individuals who could have skilled bias by the hands of police, prosecutors, or the courts.

A superior courtroom decide granted a few of Worth’s requests final 12 months. That meant freedom for a couple of defendants who had already served the phrases of their new sentences — and potential parole for others.

Then voters recalled Worth final November not even two years into her time period, throwing the resentencing marketing campaign into limbo.

When the Alameda County Board of Supervisors appointed Ursula Jones Dickson to take over as DA in January, there have been nonetheless not less than 11 resentencing petitions pending — greater than a 3rd of these Worth had filed — in line with a tally compiled by Winbush’s attorneys.

Jones Dickson is a former superior courtroom decide who had labored as a deputy district legal professional for 14 years, and he or she introduced a special philosophy to the job, one more focused on victims and their rights. She informed reporters throughout a press conference in May that she didn’t have particular plans for the conviction critiques. Nevertheless, she rapidly ended the contracts of a number of the attorneys engaged on the instances and dismantled the group Worth had assigned to deal with them. Jones Dickson’s handpicked deputies have since filed motions to withdraw numerous the excellent resentencing motions.

The response has been swift. A number of attorneys have filed courtroom briefs claiming the brand new DA is motivated extra by what she views as a political mandate to be robust on crime than by the details of every case — and that she has deserted the trouble to handle disparities in sentencing. In latest courtroom filings, they’ve included statements from Worth and her former assistant DA, Royl Roberts, that help these claims.

A number of attorneys for the incarcerated males have gone additional, arguing in courtroom that the 180 on resentencing is a part of an effort by the brand new DA and her group of profession prosecutors to stop the invention of any extra proof of previous prosecutorial misconduct. 

The brand new district legal professional’s group has defended its reversals, arguing that the selections weren’t political — and that it was Worth’s resentencing efforts that have been rushed. Jones Dickson has argued that most of the incarcerated petitioners have been by no means rehabilitated and that Worth’s group didn’t give their victims sufficient discover in regards to the resentencing petitions, justifying a change after all.

A person serving life in jail is denied resentencing

Final month, Superior Court docket Choose Armando Pastran determined one in every of Jones Dickson’s requests to withdraw a Worth resentencing movement within the case of a San Quentin prisoner named Miguel Sifuentes.

In 1998, the 19-year-old Sifuentes and two different males robbed an Outback Steakhouse in Dublin. When an Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy, John Paul Monego, responded to the theft, one of many different males shot and killed him.

The DA’s workplace, run by Thomas Orloff on the time, charged Sifuentes with homicide beneath California’s felony murder rule, which mentioned {that a} defendant could possibly be charged with homicide even when they weren’t the killer; they solely wanted to be a participant in a felony that led to a homicide. In Sifuentes’ case, the armed theft. Orloff and deputy DA Jonathan Goodfellow sought the loss of life penalty.

In 2004, a jury convicted Sifuentes of homicide however declined to ship him to loss of life row. INstead, he was sentenced to 26 years to life. Over the previous 20 years, Sifuentes has appealed his case a number of occasions in state and federal courts, with out success. 

Sifuentes’ case had been one in every of dozens of homicide convictions Worth’s resentencing unit reviewed for proof of attainable prosecutorial misconduct. Citing the truth that 9 of 12 potential Black jurors have been faraway from the jury by the prosecution, and the sample of prosecutorial discrimination established in different previous instances dealt with by the Alameda County DA, Andrea Crider, a UC Berkeley lecturer and public defender employed by Worth to work on the resentencing instances, filed a movement in November in state courtroom. In it, she argued that Sifuentes had considerably rehabilitated himself whereas incarcerated, taking programs on managing trauma and anger, and requested that his sentence be modified to a determinate time period of 30 years, which might probably end in his launch from San Quentin.

When Jones Dickson took workplace, she had her assistant DA, Catherine Horner Kobal, take over the Sifuentes case from Crider. Kobal — who has labored her complete profession within the DA’s workplace and is the daughter of a former Alameda decide who presided over not less than six of the loss of life penalty instances which have been examined for prosecutorial misconduct — filed a movement to withdraw the resentencing request on April 10. She argued that Crider was incorrect when she characterised Sifuentes’ report of rehabilitation as “distinctive.” 

Kobal cited a November 2023 parole board’s view that Sifuentes nonetheless posed a danger to public security and a December 2024 overview by jail authorities denying Sifuentes’ request to expedite his subsequent parole listening to. And he or she famous that the brand new sentence Worth’s group sought was primarily based on an incorrect understanding of sentencing legal guidelines.

She additionally argued that the DA’s workplace hadn’t carried out sufficient outreach to Monego’s household and different victims of the theft to hunt their enter.

Jones Dickson declined to be interviewed for this story. In response to written questions from The Oaklandside, she issued an announcement that learn partly, “It’s not past understanding {that a} new administration after a recall would really feel obligated to overview instances and insurance policies that the voters rejected.” 

Jones Dickson mentioned that Marsy’s Law, the 2008 sufferer’s invoice of rights regulation, and the California Structure every require that victims and their households be told of what’s occurring in legal instances that contain them. “We discovered that most of the victims’ households weren’t engaged or notified about resentencing efforts through the prior administration,” she mentioned. “We took the time and care to treatment that.”

She declined to supply touch upon ongoing instances besides to say that her group “seemed into resentencing proposals by the prior administration that weren’t legally permissible, and are working to treatment that problem.”

Kobal didn’t reply to an interview request or written questions.

Worth declined to be interviewed for this story. However in a declaration filed in one other loss of life penalty resentencing case, she defended her group’s outreach to victims. 

“We arrange and publicized a sufferer hotline,” Worth acknowledged. “We had a contract with Damaged By Violence, who held weekly conferences for survivors. We additionally seemed on the data of companies that the victims obtained and made positive to inform them in the event that they have been eligible for extra therapeutic periods or different companies. We engaged Mend Collaborative, a restorative justice group, to help victims. After all, a number of the victims have been sad. Some victims are all the time sad, and DA’s settle instances every single day even when the victims are opposed.”

Sifuentes’ legal professional, Brian Pomerantz, mentioned in a courtroom temporary that he sees Jones Dickson’s references to the parole board and to the technicalities of sentencing regulation as cowl for a blanket coverage of withdrawing resentencing motions. He cited a 2023 decision by a state appeals court hanging down an try by San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins to withdraw a resentencing movement that had been filed by her predecessor, who was additionally recalled, Chesa Boudin. The courtroom discovered Jenkins’ reversal to be improper as a result of she didn’t supply any causes primarily based in regulation, nor did she current new proof. The movement, the courtroom discovered, was primarily based on a change in “political winds.”

The 2 sides within the Sifuentes case argued earlier than Pastran, the Superior Court docket decide, throughout two days of intense hearings in June. Monego’s household and a number of other others impacted by the theft and capturing 28 years in the past addressed the courtroom, talking about their grief and their need to not see Sifuentes resentenced. A number of supporters of Sifuentes additionally testified, saying they believed he had been rehabilitated and deserved an opportunity at freedom. Over a dozen sheriff’s deputies stood behind the courtroom. 

On Aug. 22, Pastran issued his order, giving Jones Dickson a inexperienced mild to withdraw the resenting request.

In his 18-page determination, Pastran wrote that Jones Dickson had proven a “professional foundation” for withdrawing the movement.

“There was a change in administration following a recall election,” Pastran wrote, noting that this might create “the potential for political concerns to overshadow professional causes for looking for withdrawal of a resentencing request.” Nonetheless, Pastran wrote, he discovered the brand new DA’s “total arguments for withdrawal persuasive.”

Pastran dismissed Sifuentes’ core argument: that he needs to be resentenced due to the proof of bias in how Alameda County prosecutors dealt with jury choice in loss of life penalty instances throughout the identical time interval as when Sifuentes went to trial.

In his determination, Pastran wrote that Sifuentes’ “allegations of racial bias within the practices of the Alameda County District Lawyer’s Workplace on this and different instances, if true, are deeply troubling and needs to be addressed.”

Pomerantz informed The Oaklandside that he was greatly surprised by this a part of Pastran’s ruling.

“At this stage — after every thing we have now seen and realized in regards to the Alameda County District Lawyer’s workplace’s 30-plus years of concentrating on Black, Jewish, and homosexual and lesbian potential jurors — I used to be shocked to see somebody query if it occurred,” Pomerantz mentioned. “There’s a mountain of inside prosecution paperwork exhibiting that it occurred for many years, and the courtroom had dozens of examples earlier than it.”

What Worth had achieved ‘wanted to be undone’

After the ruling, Pomerantz filed a uncommon form of request with the courtroom, asking Pastran to rethink.

In line with the movement, Pastran’s determination wasn’t supported by the proof launched in Worth’s resentencing movement, together with 136 pages of jury choice notes from different capital instances exhibiting “racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, and misogynistic conduct.” And Pomerantz launched a brand new piece of proof that had just lately emerged in one other resentencing case — one the place Jones Dickson had additionally reversed course. 

That proof, a sworn assertion from Royl Roberts, the one who served as interim DA after Worth was recalled, appeared to substantiate that Jones Dickson’s curiosity in scuttling the resentencing efforts was unrelated to the particular details of every case. 

Roberts had been Worth’s chief assistant district legal professional — her proper hand — and for a number of weeks after her recall, from Dec. 5, 2024, to Feb. 19 of this 12 months when Jones Dickson was sworn in, he ran the DA’s workplace. 

In line with Roberts’ declaration, after the recall, veteran deputy prosecutors, together with some who had labored beneath Nancy O’Mally and Thomas Orloff, began to strain him to withdraw resentencing motions. 

Roberts’ declaration was filed by attorneys representing Winbush, who had been sentenced to loss of life in 2003 for homicide and was looking for resentencing primarily based on the previous sample of prosecutorial misconduct, amongst different components.

“When the brand new D.A., Jones Dickson, was chosen,” Roberts mentioned, “she started to make what she wished achieved identified to me. This was by means of a collection of private communications primarily from Catherine Kobal” and one other veteran deputy DA.

“After Pamela Worth was recalled, strain started to be introduced on me by sure senior ADAs and managerial workers of the district legal professional’s workplace to vary a number of the resentencing suggestions or to place a moratorium on the resentencing work that had begun throughout Worth’s tenure,” Roberts mentioned. “The communications I obtained left me with the impression that regardless of the earlier workplace had achieved wanted to be undone.”

Roberts informed The Oaklandside that he respects Jones Dickson and may see each side of the argument round resentencing. “The factor I took problem with is that they mentioned, ‘We have to take away every thing that was achieved as a result of it was achieved by DA Worth,’” he mentioned. “‘Simply the truth that DA Worth did it, it must be destroyed.’ That was the request of me in my brief stint. However what I mentioned and did is I’d check out issues and make an impartial determination.”  

In his movement, Pomerantz wrote that Roberts’ description of what occurred after Worth’s recall “made clear the political nature” of the workplace’s determination to withdraw the resentencing movement for Sifuentes.

Pomerantz went additional, claiming that Pastran’s ties to the DA’s workplace made it troublesome for him to impartially contemplate the resentencing instances. Pastran served within the DA’s workplace from 2006 to 2022, “through the time that many defendants’ constitutional rights have been violated,” Pomerantz wrote.

Pastran took over a lot of the excellent resentencing instances from one other decide after Worth’s recall. He didn’t reply to an interview request from The Oaklandside. 

“He’s not going to remark as a result of judicial ethics forestall him from discussing ongoing instances/hearings,” Paul Rosynsky, a spokesperson for the courtroom, mentioned by e mail.

In his declaration, Roberts additionally addressed questions on Kobal’s function in dealing with the Sifuentes case. Kobal, he claimed, had “expressed that she didn’t wish to be in the course of resentencing points as a result of her father, Jeffrey Horner, had beforehand served on the bench and had presided over a number of the instances concerned; she acknowledged the looks of that was problematic.”

Roberts informed The Oaklandside that he discovered the work achieved by the workplace’s resentencing unit to be considerate {and professional}, weighing all the professionals and cons. But Roberts mentioned in his declaration that a number of senior assistant district attorneys who had been within the workplace for greater than 20 years “put strain on her” — Kobal — to attempt to cease the resentencing efforts. Amongst them have been prosecutors who had dealt with a number of the instances being thought of for resentencing.

Worth, too, offered a sworn assertion to Winbush’s attorneys. 

She mentioned that in her tenure the workplace had “11 deputy district attorneys who had relationships with actors alleged to have been concerned within the Batson issues,” a reference to biased jury choice for homicide trials. She mentioned she made positive none of them have been assigned to the resentencing instances.

In line with Worth’s declaration, Jones Dickson instantly dismantled the workplace’s Civil Rights Bureau, house to the group Worth had established to conduct the loss of life penalty conviction critiques. “She got here in with an previous group chart she received from former DA Nancy O’Malley with all of the names eliminated, and he or she reassigned or fired all of the workers,” Worth alleged.

“Jones Dickson, earlier than being sworn in, stopped resentencings in capital instances,” she mentioned. “How she completed that I couldn’t say.”

Resentencing on ice for the reason that recall

Like Sifuentes, Winbush was 19 years previous in 1995 and contemporary out of years being held by the California Youth Authority when he and a pal determined to rob the house of an Oakland drug vendor. Once they arrived, the person wasn’t house however his girlfriend, Erika Beeson, was. After Winbush and his codefendant stole $300 in money, a shotgun, and a few marijuana, they strangled and stabbed Beeson, killing her. 

Winbush was convicted of Beeson’s homicide in 2003 and a jury sentenced him to loss of life.

In February, Roberts, in his ultimate days as interim DA, requested his group to pursue Winbush’s resentencing from life with out parole to 30 years to life, which might finally permit him to hunt parole.

Deputy DA James Conger, who had beforehand labored for Boudin in San Francisco and for the town’s Division of Police Accountability, dealt with the Winbush resentencing case. In courtroom filings, he argued that Winbush had skilled profound psychological and bodily trauma as a baby. Winbush, he mentioned, grew up in a neighborhood rife with violence and was first arrested at age 12. “Over the following seven years,” Conger wrote in a courtroom temporary, “he cycled by means of varied detention amenities, the place he confronted intervals of confinement, restricted entry to training, and marginal psychological well being help.” 

Winbush’s incarceration by the California Youth Authority, Conger wrote, coincided with a interval of peak inhabitants on the company’s amenities, which grew to become the “topic of intense criticism of the establishment and their remedy of youth,” together with allegations of abusive situations, use of solitary confinement, guards forcing youngsters to battle one another, denial of meals as punishment, and excessive charges of suicide. Winbush had spent his complete grownup life behind bars, Conger argued, as a result of the juvenile justice system had didn’t rehabilitate him. 

He’d had early disciplinary issues in jail, however now, at 47, Winbush’s age and progress with rehabilitative programming made him a low danger to the neighborhood if paroled, Conger instructed.

Conger additionally argued that Winbush’s sentence ought to change as a result of his case was prone to result in additional litigation over questions of whether or not or not he was given a good trial. 

Conger didn’t concede that the DA’s workplace engaged in wrongdoing throughout jury choice when Winbush, who’s Black, went to trial in 2003. However Conger identified that Winbush’s attorneys had argued elsewhere that the prosecutor who tried him, Morris Jacobson, emphasised Winbush’s “juvenile historical past to painting him as a complicated and harmful legal, perpetuating dangerous racial stereotypes.” This may occasionally have constituted a violation of the Racial Justice Act.

Conger additionally famous that the prosecution used peremptory challenges to take away each single potential Black juror within the Winbush case. 

In an older homicide trial, that of Ernest Dykes in 1995, Jacobson assisted the primary prosecutor, Colton Carmine, throughout jury choice. The prosecutions’ notes from that trial present that they centered on the race and ethnicity of potential Black and Jewish jurors and used derogatory language about folks within the jury pool. Each potential juror who was Jewish or Black was struck. Dykes’ conviction was the one which Chhabria, the district courtroom decide, overturned final 12 months — sparking Worth’s overview of all of the county’s loss of life penalty instances.

On Jan. 8, Roberts, saying he wished to keep away from additional authorized fights over such questions within the Winbush case, requested the courtroom to problem a brand new sentence of 30 years to life.

Two months later, on March 25, Jones Dickson filed a movement looking for to withdraw the resentencing request for Winbush. She assigned Timothy Wagstaffe, a deputy DA who had labored within the Alameda District Lawyer’s workplace for 19 years, to take over the case from Conger. Wagstaffe filed a brand new movement saying that the resentencing request “failed to think about the opinions of Erika Beeson’s household.” Jones Dickson’s group had just lately gotten involved with them, he mentioned, and Beeson’s sister and two cousins have been each against the lowered sentence.

Wagstaffe additionally argued that litigation over potential violations of the Racial Justice Act was unlikely, claiming that the removing of three Black potential jurors through the 2003 trial couldn’t be litigated beneath the 2020 Racial Justice Act. Although the regulation is ambiguous — it doesn’t particularly point out bias in jury choice — Wagstaffe insisted that this type of problem must be pursued in different methods.

An legal professional representing Winbush, Rebecca Johnson, filed a reply to Wagstaffe’s movement in courtroom noting that it “says nothing in regards to the historical past of misconduct” within the DA’s workplace that led to Chhabria’s order and Worth’s overview of dozens of instances, together with Winbush’s.

Johnson argued that the shift in management on the DA’s workplace from Worth to Jones Dickson risked producing two completely completely different units of outcomes within the overview of the county’s loss of life penalty instances.

“If profitable, the motions to withdraw on this case and different pending instances additionally will produce one other form of injustice and arbitrariness — creating two lessons of death-sentenced defendants in Alameda County, differentiated by nothing greater than the identification of the administration when their resentencing hearings have been carried out.”

Below Worth, resentencing requests within the loss of life penalty instances have been principally authorized. Superior Court docket Choose Thomas Stevens granted 18 motions that he thought of.

In her eight months in workplace, Jones Dickson has moved to rescind these requests in not less than six instances reviewed by The Oaklandside. Pastran has up to now sided with the brand new DA in Sifuentes’ case.

It’s not clear but whether or not that sample will maintain true for Winbush and others.