Decision Avoids Collision with Long-standing Constitutional Requirement

Sacramento, CA—June 1, 2026— The California Supreme Court today decided three murder cases involving California’s “Racial Justice Act”(RJA), a law intended to address racial bias in criminal proceedings. The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation (CJLF) filed briefs in all three cases, arguing that portions of the law could have unintended consequences, including undermining otherwise valid convictions and sentences in serious violent crime cases. CJLF urged the Court to apply longstanding constitutional principles governing harmless error and appellate review.

The three cases involve sentences of death rendered long ago. Given the facts of the cases, it is obvious that all the murderers are on death row because of the crimes they chose to commit, not racial bias.

• Anthony Bankston is a Los Angeles gang member who shot two people to death, shot at and tried to kill two others, and wounded one of them. All this carnage was merely because two of the victims were members of rival gangs and two were accompanying a rival gang member. Bankston later threatened the witnesses against him.

• Marcos Barrera regularly abused his children, beating two-year-old Lupita and five-year-old Ernesto every day. When the beatings finally killed the children, Barrera took the bodies to remote areas to bury. He was caught by deputy sheriffs the second time, and he was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances of torture and multiple murder.

• Run Chhuon and Samreth Pan were members of a Sacramento street gang called the Tiny Rascals Gang. They and a third gangster committed a home invasion robbery, in which they shot to death a 74-year-old man and his son and also shot the son's wife in the hip. All the victims were unarmed. Later, they committed a drive-by shooting in Pomona, killing one person and attempting to kill another. Both had previously been convicted of another murder, five murders in Chhuon’s case.

 The RJA permits, and sometimes requires, findings of racial bias during a trial out of incidents that actually have nothing to do with race. In the Bankston case, the defendant claims that references to him as a “hardcore gang member” amount to bias, although he was, in fact, a hardcore gang member, willing to murder other people merely for belonging to or associating with a rival gang. The act retroactively declares animal references to be racial bias, even though people have been using animal stories to illustrate human behavior at least as far back as Aesop’s Fables. In this case, the prosecutor used an analogy of seeing a tiger in a zoo versus meeting one in the jungle. That analogy has nothing to do with race and has been repeatedly approved as fair comment by the California Supreme Court, yet the California Attorney General has conceded this as “error” under the RJA.

The California Constitution forbids reversal of criminal judgments for technical errors that are unlikely to have affected the judgment. The RJA instead requires reversal on a standard much more favorable to the defendant. CJLF’s brief explains the history of the constitutional provision to show that the RJA is contrary to it and unconstitutional.

Another provision of the RJA purports to bar reimposition of the death penalty on any retrial of a capital case when the original sentence was reversed under the RJA. This, too, is beyond the authority of the Legislature to mandate, CJLF’s brief explains. The criteria for which cases can result in a death sentence were set by the people by initiative measures. Under the California Constitution, the Legislature cannot amend initiative measures except incompliance with the initiative’s amendment provision. Otherwise, the Legislature must put the amendment on the ballot and let the people decide whether to approve it.

In today’s decision, the California Supreme Court rejected the argument that the RJA requires automatic reversal regardless of whether the error had any effect on the case, “at least in cases in which judgment was entered before the RJA was passed and took effect.” The court relied on the long history of the California Constitution’s “harmless error” provision, going back to 1911, citing research from CJLF’s brief. The question remains as to whether the RJA requires automatic reversal in new cases and whether such a requirement would be constitutional.

The court also rejected the claim that the RJA transforms any reference to an animal into a violation. The court did, however, find that the tiger story in Bankston’s case was a reversible error, despite its previous opinions approving that specific usage as proper comment.

Finally, the court stretched the language regarding seeking the death penalty on retrial to avoid the constitutional problem. The court held that the prosecution can retry the penalty phase and seek a new death judgment if it chooses to do so.

The court reversed the judgment in Pan’s case for reasons unrelated to the RJA issue. The convictions and death sentences for Barrera and Chhuon were affirmed.

“The court wisely avoided some of the worst aspects of this ill-considered law,” said CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger. “Other aspects still threaten the unjust release of many violent criminals, though,” he added.