End of Death Penalty Bias Probe Sought

State and local prosecutors Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to abandon a sweeping, 3-year-old inquiry into thousands of capital cases to determine whether death sentences have been imposed discriminatorily in California.

The court, under former Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, had ordered a special proceeding in 1984 after attorneys for condemned murderer Earl Lloyd Jackson contended that capital punishment had been unfairly sought more often when the victims were white and the assailants were black.

State Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and other prosecutors argued in papers filed with the court that the inquiry should be dropped in the wake of a major ruling in April by the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting statistical data as a means of showing racial discrimination in capital cases.

“The effect of the high court’s decision . . . is to all but foreclose the use of statistics to prove discrimination or arbitrariness in the imposition of the death penalty,” the officials said.

They noted also that the investigation into Jackson’s claims had already cost taxpayers more than $1 million and that a formal hearing on the issue, expected to take up to two months to complete, had not even been scheduled.

Jackson, who is black, was convicted and sentenced to death in the killing of two elderly white women in Long Beach in 1977. The state Supreme Court upheld the sentence in 1980, one of only four times in which it has done so since capital punishment was restored in 1977.

Then, in subsequent proceedings, the court appointed retired state Appellate Justice Bernard Jefferson to conduct a special inquiry to examine Jackson’s claims of discrimination. Jefferson ordered prosecutors to produce data on homicide cases dating to 1977 to see whether they would reveal statistical evidence of racial disparities in the prosecution of capital crimes.

According to officials, preliminary data has been provided to Jackson’s attorneys on more than 10,000 cases. But the two sides have been locked in a long-running dispute over how much more information must be obtained by law enforcement authorities for use in weighing Jackson’s contentions.

Meanwhile, defendants in other capital cases pending in California courts have made similar requests for data on other homicide cases, searching for evidence of discrimination.

On April 22, the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in the case of a black Georgia prison inmate sentenced to death for killing a white police officer, held that statistical data showing racial disparities were not sufficient to support the inmate’s claims without proof that he himself was the victim of discrimination.

The case had been regarded by foes of capital punishment as perhaps the last broad attack that could be made on the constitutionality of the death penalty.

In California, defense attorneys vowed to continue their attack on the death penalty on the grounds that it was discriminatory under the state Constitution. A ruling by the state Supreme Court upholding Jackson would have momentous impact, all but eliminating the imposition of the death penalty in California.

But most legal observers now view such a decision as unlikely in the wake of the defeat of Bird and two other justices in the November election.

The court, now led by Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas, contains a majority of appointees by Gov. George Deukmejian, a sharp critic of Bird and, as a legislator, author of the law that reinstituted capital punishment in the state.