During an extraordinary hearing in Alameda County Superior Court on Tuesday, the motives of the county’s new district attorney, Ursula Jones Dickson, were effectively put on trial.

Jones Dickson is seeking to undo the work begun under former DA Pamela Price to review a number of death penalty sentences. Those cases involved Alameda County prosecutors who, it emerged last year, systematically excluded Black and Jewish people from juries in capital cases . The resentencings were meant to help address this history of constitutional due process violations.

Since the revelations of systemic prosecutorial misconduct last year, 20 of the 34 prisoners on death row from Alameda County have been removed from death row. Some were resentenced to life without parole, some were given indeterminate

See Full Page