Tuesday, June 2, 2026

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California Supreme Court:

No Automatic Reversal for Pre-Enactment RJA Violations

While Opinion Reverses Death Judgment Due to Prosecutor’s Statements Comparing Defendant to Tiger, Majority Rejects View That All Animal Parallels Are Racist; Liu, Evans Write Separately

By Kimber Cooley, associate editor

A divided California Supreme Court held yesterday that automatic reversal is not required for pre-enactment violations of the 2021 law governing the use of race in criminal proceedings and declared that recent amendments to the statutory scheme do not take the death penalty off the table after a breach has been found, highlighting constitutional implications at play.

The holdings come by way of a decision in which the court reversed the judgment of death imposed on Anthony Bankston based on a prosecutor’s statements at the penalty phase—comparing the defendant to a Bengal tiger that may appear docile in captivity but ferocious if encountered in the wild and repeated references to the killer as a “thug”—based on finding that there was a reasonable possibility that the descriptions affected the jury’s penalty verdict.

Justice Leondra Kruger wrote the majority opinion, joined in by Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and Justices Carol Corrigan, Joshua P. Groban, and retired Justice Martin J. Jenkins, sitting by assignment, declining to find that the use of animal descriptors is always a violation of the Racial Justice Act of 2020 (“RJA”). She said:

“Although the RJA explicitly prohibits some ‘language that compares the defendant to an animal’…, we are unpersuaded that the RJA categorically forbids all such language. A prosecutor might, for instance, refer to a defendant as an ‘eager beaver,’ ‘happy as a clam,’ ‘free as a bird,’ or ‘quiet as a mouse.’…[W]e must carefully consider context when determining whether particular statements violate the RJA.”

Reluctant Agreement

Writing separately, Justice Liu agreed, with some “reluctance,” that the “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt standard applies” to a court’s analysis of RJA claims in “cases in which judgment was entered before 2021” but said:

“Readers looking for firm legal guidance on animal comparisons may well conclude that today’s decisions leave open the possibility that some renditions of even the Bengal tiger story will not be found to violate the RJA. That is not what the Legislature intended.”

Concurring only in the judgment, Justice Kelli Evans accused the majority of “substantially dilut[ing]” the reach of the RJA in contradiction to the Legislature’s intent and commented:

“Under the majority’s model, the question will no longer be Was the language used an appeal to racial bias? but will instead be How much racial bias is too much? Such an approach seems likely to bring the judicial system into disrepute.”

Three other decisions were filed yesterday in which the court rejected the petitioning defendants’ RJA claims in automatic appeals from judgments of death, each citing the Bankston decision. The cases mark the high court’s first substantive applications of the statutory scheme.

Multiple Murders

Bankston was convicted of the May 1991 Los Angeles-area murders of Jesus Sanchez and Benjamin Jones in what the prosecutors described as gang-related homicides. A jury found true a multiple-murder special circumstance, and he was sentenced to death on January 20, 1995.

In his automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court he asserted multiples claims of violations of the RJA, codified at Penal Code §745, which provides that “[t]he state shall not seek or obtain a criminal conviction or…sentence on the basis of race” and that a violation includes the use of “racially discriminatory language” that “to an objective observer…appeals to racial bias, including…language that compares the defendant to an animal.”

The law mandates in subdivision (e) that “if the court finds that a conviction was sought or obtained in violation of [the statute], the court shall vacate the conviction and sentence, find that it is legally invalid, and order new proceedings” and that “when the court finds there has been a violation of subdivision (a), the defendant shall not be eligible for the death penalty.”

Subdivision (k) was adopted in 2022 and specifies, in relevant part:

“For petitions that are filed in cases for which judgment was entered before January 1, 2021,…the petitioner shall be entitled to relief as provided in subdivision (e), unless the state proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the violation did not contribute to the judgment.”

Penalty Phase

Addressing the prosecutor’s statements during the penalty phase, Kruger pointed to the prosecutor’s statement in which the attorney said:

“We have a journalist going to the zoo…and he sees a plaque….[that] says…Bengal tiger…This tiger is just kind of laid out, real lethargic….[A hunter says to him,] ‘That’s not a Bengal tiger.’….So the two of them…go off to India in search of a Bengal tiger. As they go into the jungle[]…, the journalist…sees this enormous tiger. He sees the muscles all flexed out, he sees the claws out, he sees the fangs,…he hears the growl. And he runs back to the hunter and the hunter says, ‘Now you see a Bengal tiger.’ ”

The attorney added:

“[L]adies and gentlemen, the person that we see here in court is not the person that was out on the streets….”

Noting that the lawyers with the Attorney General’s Office did not dispute that the Bengal tiger reference involved the use of racially discriminatory language and was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, Kruger declared:

“In light of the passage of the RJA, we now make clear that…the Bengal tiger story should no longer be told in California courtrooms.”

She continued:

“As for cases already tried, we need not and do not now decide whether past tellings of the Bengal tiger story…always give rise to an RJA violation. Here, the Attorney General concedes that the prosecutor’s argument constituted error under the RJA. After carefully considering the challenged statements in their broader context, we agree with the Attorney General….”

Manner of Telling

Saying that “Bankston’s claim of penalty phase error does not rest merely on the telling of the Bengal tiger story” but “also rests on the manner in which the story was told,” she remarked that “in addition to her embellished telling of the Bengal tiger story, the prosecutor repeatedly described Bankston as a ‘thug.’ ” Acknowledging that the term is racially neutral on its face, she commented:

“Considering the penalty phase argument as a whole, we agree with both parties that an objective observer would find that the prosecutor’s language constituted an implicit appeal to bias within the meaning of section 745….”

Rejecting the defendant’s assertion that any violation of the act requires automatic reversal of the judgment in its entirety, she pointed to §13 of Article VI of the California Constitution, which was adopted by way of an initiative process and provides that “[n]o judgment shall be set aside” unless “the court shall be of the opinion that the error complained of has resulted in a miscarriage of justice.” The justice reasoned:

“[W]e avoid the serious constitutional questions that would arise were we to conclude that the Legislature intended to override the court’s constitutionally assigned role in determining whether a miscarriage of justice has occurred….”

The court added in a footnote:

“We disapprove [the 2024 Sixth District decision in] People v. Stubblefield…to the extent its reasoning is inconsistent with our opinion concerning the appropriate analysis in cases in which judgment was entered before the RJA took effect.”

Evan’s View

Asserting that “[a] defendant whose trial was tainted by an appeal to racial bias need not show anything further to obtain an effective remedy under the Act,” Evans argued:

“The majority opinion disagrees. ‘[A]t least with respect to cases tried to judgment before the RJA took effect,’ it is willing to tolerate the existence of racial bias and deny relief to defendants who suffer appeals to racial bias at their trials if…the activation of racial bias ‘can be shown to be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ”

The case is People v. Bankston, 2026 S.O.S. 1571.

In People v. Chhuon and Pan, 2026 S.O.S. 1523, the court yesterday declared that a defense attorney’s reference to his client as a child “from the jungle” did not raise concerns under the RJA where the context indicated that the statement was made to raise sympathy for the defendant. The court added:

“Future cases may also need to consider an additional issue not raised here: whether when a claim based upon defense counsel’s own remarks raises concerns about counsel purposefully creating reversible error for the benefit of one’s own client.”

In yesterday’s opinion in People v. Demolle, 2026 S.O.S. 1494. the high court found that the prosecutor’s comparison of a defendant to a wolf in sheep’s clothing did not violate the RJA. Similarly, in People v. Barrera, 2026 S.O.S. 1548, the court held that the prosecutor’s citation to the defendant’s work as a street vendor did not run afoul of the act where it was relevant to other issues.

Evans at least partially dissented as to all three decisions, and Liu wrote separately in each matter.