Tuesday, February 17, 2026
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Court of Appeal:
Error to Deny Racial Justice Challenge With No Explanation
Opinion Says Even if Case Law Provides That Judge Need Not Use Magic Words in Rejecting Objection to Prosecutor’s Exercise of Peremptory Challenge, Jurist Must Say Something
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
Div. Five of the First District Court of Appeal held Friday that the conviction of a man accused of contacting a minor for lewd purposes, after a law enforcement child predator sting revealed sexual messages he sent to a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl, must be reversed due to a trial judge failing to provide any reasoning when denying a defense objection to the prosecutor’s exercise of a peremptory challenge based on the Racial Justice Act.
Justice Gordon B. Burns authored Friday’s opinion, joined in by Presiding Justice Teri L. Jackson and Justice Danny Y. Chou, acknowledging case law establishing that courts need not use magic words in denying such an objection. However, he declared:
“To be sure, courts have held that [the Racial Justice Act] does not require a trial court to explain its reasons ‘in any particular manner or at any particular level of detail.’…We have no need to decide how much explanation would have sufficed. It is enough to say that some explanation is required.”
At issue is Code of Civil Procedure §231.7, which provides that “[a] party shall not use a peremptory challenge to remove a prospective juror on the basis of…race” or other protected status. The law sets forth a list of presumptively pretextual reasons for striking a panelist, including “[e]xpressing a distrust of or having a negative experience with law enforcement” or saying that police officers “engage in racial profiling.”
To overcome the presumption, a party must show, by clear and convincing evidence, that “an objectively reasonable person would view the rationale as unrelated to a prospective juror’s race” and “[t]he court shall explain the reasons for its ruling on the record” based on an analysis of the totality of the circumstances.
Sting Operation
The question arose after Randall Oscar-Kelly Alston was found guilty by a jury of an attempted lewd act on a child, in violation of Penal Code §664/288(a), and other related offenses in 2023. Criminal charges flowed from an investigation led by Brentwood Police Department Detective Jeffrey Agostinho, who set up a profile posing as an 18-year-old girl on the social media website Tagged.
Alston took the bait and proposed that the two meet up after Agostinho expressed that the fictitious female was only 13 years old. Sexual messages were exchanged, and Alston was arrested when he showed up at the agreed-upon location.
During voir dire, one Hispanic prospective juror, identified in the opinion as “Ms. G.,” identified herself as a “person of color” and said that she “grew up in a community” where there had been so many instances of law enforcement “not being truthful” and that it would be hard for her to separate her personal experiences in the Bay Area from testimony by the Brentwood police officers.
When the attorney with the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office pressed her about whether she could assess an officer’s credibility fairly, she responded:
“No. I don’t think so, no.”
Peremptory Challenge
After the defendant objected to a peremptory challenge to excuse Ms. G, the prosecutor explained:
“[T]his is a case…that is solely dependent on law enforcement actions and testimony, and I…gave her multiple opportunities yesterday in different ways of telling me that she could be fair and not let her biases enter into the picture when she was evaluating witness credibility. She repeatedly said she didn’t think she could be fair, and that was based on her concern [regarding the Antioch Police Department], that she has—either had experience or heard about.”
Defense counsel argued that a juror’s distrust of law enforcement is a presumptively invalid reason for the exercise of a peremptory challenge. In response, the prosecutor said:
“[A]n expression of distrust or belief of concern about law enforcement, those are not my reasons. My reasons were very specific to witness evaluation and being a fair juror in the case.”
Contra Costa Superior Court Judge Jennifer D. Lee denied the §231.7 objection without comment.
No Findings
Burns noted that the lawyers with the Office of the Attorney General assert on appeal that the trial prosecutor’s reasons for challenging the prospective panelist did not include a presumptively invalid reason and so, even if the trial court did not technically comply with the statutory requirements, reversal is not required.
Addressing this contention, the jurist opined:
“This misses the point. Even if we assume…that the People are right that the prosecutor did not rely on any presumptively invalid reason or that any presumption of invalidity was overcome, the trial court was nonetheless required to consider the prosecutor’s reasons, in light of the totality of the circumstances, to decide whether it was substantially likely a reasonable person would consider race to have been a factor in the prosecutor’s challenge, and to ‘explain the reasons for its ruling on the record.’ ”
He continued:
“Here, the trial court did not state any reasons for its ruling, much less mention…indicate why an objectively reasonable person would not view perceived membership in any cognizable group as a factor in the prosecutor’s use of the peremptory challenge….The trial court cannot satisfy the statutory mandate to explain its reasons on the record by saying nothing.”
Appropriate Reason
Acknowledging that “[a] prospective juror’s suspected bias is an appropriate reason to exercise a peremptory challenge—if the challenging party’s concerns are ‘specific to the juror’ and unrelated to the challenging party’s own ‘conscious or unconscious bias,’ ” he remarked:
“The record here may support a finding—had it been made—that the prosecutor’s presumptively invalid reason was ‘unrelated to [the prosecutor’s] conscious or unconscious bias and [was] instead specific to the juror….’….However,…the trial court…did not make any such finding.”
The justice cited the 2023 decision by the Sixth District Court of Appeal in People v. Ortiz and added:
“Although the parties do not cite it, we observe that Ortiz…held that an appellate court may independently review whether the explanation requirement…is satisfied despite the trial court having made no express finding on that issue….We need not consider whether Ortiz was correctly decided because, assuming that it was, we see no reason to further extend that reasoning to excuse what happened here—when the trial court said absolutely nothing….”
The case is People v. Alston, A169256.
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