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Court of Appeal:
No Case-Specific Allegations Needed for Racial Data Demand
Opinion Says District Attorney’s Office May Be Required to Turn Over Charging Statistics Under Racial Justice Act Even if Defendant Does Not Claim Any Bias in His Interactions
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
Div. Three of the First District Court of Appeal held yesterday that a defendant seeking discovery from prosecutors under the Racial Justice Act—including requests for the date, name, race, and addresses of persons charged with similar offenses and allegations to those found in his charging documents—may meet the good cause standard for ordering such disclosures based on county-wide statistical information without any case-specific evidence of bias.
The Racial Justice Act (“RJA”), codified at Penal Code §745, was adopted by the Legislature to address implicit bias in the criminal justice system. To accomplish that purpose, the section, effective Jan. 1, 2021, provides:
“The state shall not seek or obtain a criminal conviction or seek, obtain, or impose a sentence on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.”
Subdivision (a)(3) specifies that a violation may be shown if the defendant proves:
“The defendant was charged or convicted of a more serious offense than defendants of other races…who have engaged in similar conduct and are similarly situated, and the evidence establishes that the prosecution more frequently sought or obtained convictions for more serious offenses against people who share the defendant’s race…in the county where the convictions were sought or obtained.”
Under the act, statistical significance “is a factor” the court may consider in determining whether “systemic and institutional racial bias” may have contributed to any disparity.
Sec. 745(d) requires a court to order the state to disclose “all evidence relevant to a potential violation” upon a showing of good cause.
Criminal Charges
The question arose after defendant Jayden McDaniel, who is Black, was charged with attempted first-degree murder, among other offenses, and a gang enhancement.
He filed a motion for discovery under §745(d), seeking the requested statistical information from the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office, arguing that the data was relevant to his claim that the office more frequently charges gang enhancements against Black defendants than members of other racial communities.
In support of his motion, he asserted that the Legislature has acknowledged that California’s gang-related charges and enhancements have a disproportionate impact on persons of color.
He points to a 2020 report published by the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, which found that 10.9% of San Mateo residents serving state prison sentences relating to gang enhancements were Black, even though the overall population of the group in the locality was only 2.7 percent. In contrast, the report concluded that only 3.63% of such prisoners were White, the dominant racial group in the county.
He also submitted a declaration by Beth Redbird, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who averred that further data is required to make a more detailed assessment, but that there is a “valid” racial disparity connected with the gang enhancement.
San Mateo Superior Court Judge Michael K. Wendler denied the motion for discovery, finding that neither the statistical information nor the declaration “provides the requisite specific facts necessary to satisfy the threshold requirement.” McDaniel filed a petition for a writ of mandamus.
Petition Granted
In an opinion, authored by Justice Ioana Petrou and joined in by Presiding Justice Alison M. Tucher and Justice Carin T. Fujisaki, the court granted his petition.
Petrou acknowledged that the only published Court of Appeal case addressing the “good cause” standard for granting discovery from prosecutors is the 2022 First District decision in Young v. Superior Court, which held that “a defendant is required only to advance a plausible factual foundation, based on specific facts, that a violation of the [RJA] ‘could or might have occurred’ in his case.”
However, she concluded that the court’s conclusion that McDaniel need not rely on case-specific allegations to meet the good cause threshold for discovery under the RJA “is not in conflict” with the Young decision because in that case the defendant’s proffered statewide statistics were not sufficient to establish an inference of racial profiling absent evidence relating to the specific circumstances of the arrest.
She declared:
“Here, the primary question is whether the prosecutor’s decision to charge McDaniel with a gang enhancement was the result of racial bias. In other words, would Black defendants be more likely to be charged with gang enhancements than White defendants under similar circumstances? In such a scenario, case-specific facts—apart from a defendant’s race and the charges against him—may not be persuasive evidence of potential racial bias. Instead, county-level data reflecting a racial disparity in charging or convictions may provide a plausible basis for asserting that an RJA violation ‘could or might have’ occurred.”
Text of Act
Petrou pointed to the text of the RJA and noted:
“[P]roof of a section 745, subdivision (a)(3) violation—e.g., differences in seeking or obtaining convictions and differences in imposing sentences—calls for systemic or institutional analyses that are most likely demonstrated at least in part through statistical evidence. Thus, the statutory language of the RJA supports McDaniel’s use of statistical evidence as an appropriate mechanism for proving racial disparity in charging.”
She continued:
“In seeking discovery, parties only need to show plausibility based on ‘specific facts.’…That showing could be met by case-specific facts, as offered in Young. Or it could be met by specific statistical facts relevant to the charges and individuals involved….Or both. Neither the RJA nor Young requires any particular type of ‘specific facts.’ Nor do we. Rather, courts should focus on the relevance of the proffered facts to the claims of racial bias to determine whether a minimally plausible basis exists to grant discovery—a low threshold.”
Turning to the evidence McDaniel offered in support of his motion, she remarked:
“While in no way definitive, this evidence presents specific facts of actual racial disparities in gang and gang enhancement charges brought by prosecutors in San Mateo County. And those disparities are sufficient to support a plausible claim that gang charges could or might be impacted by racial bias.”
Missing Context
The jurist acknowledged that McDaniel’s evidence may be criticized for missing some context—such as the percentage of the racial makeup of all gang members in the county and the fact that the defendant was not from San Mateo—but wrote:
“Undoubtedly, courts must provide some review of statistical data, even at the discovery stage….But if the statistical data demonstrates an actual racial disparity in the charging decisions of the county, weaknesses in the data pool or concerns about additional data points do not necessarily negate the plausible factual foundation that an RJA violation ‘could or might have occurred.’ ”
She went on to say:
“Here, McDaniel has provided county-specific data that presented a ‘plausible’ showing of a racial disparity, supported by an expert declaration supporting the possibility of an actual racial disparity….At the discovery stage, requiring defendants to resolve all statistical flaws or provide analysis from a larger data pool, when such data has not yet been provided by the district attorney’s office, would not be consistent with the legislative intent behind the Act.”
Petrou said that “a question remains regarding the appropriate scope of his request” and remanded for the trial court to engage in a “discretionary weighing” of the potential probative value of the information sought and the burden of gathering the requested records.
She declared:
“Let a peremptory writ of mandate issue directing respondent superior court to vacate its order denying McDaniel’s motion for discovery under the Racial Justice Act, and to conduct a new hearing to reconsider McDaniel’s discovery motion in a manner consistent with this opinion.”
The case is McDaniel v. Superior Court, 2025 S.O.S. 1313.
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