Thursday, July 2, 2026
Page 3
Court of Appeal:
Detective’s Testimony About Race War Did Not Violate RJA
Opinion Says Officer’s Statement That He Focused on Hispanic Possible Culprits After Learning Victim Was Black Was Insufficient to Support Racial Justice Claim Where Evidence of Ethnic Hostilities in Area
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Div. Two of the Fourth District Court of Appeal has rejected as meritless a defendant’s claim that his rights under a law aimed at eliminating racism from the criminal justice system were violated based on a detective’s testimony that “if you investigate a crime in the east side Riverside neighborhood, and the victim is Mexican, you assume you’re looking for a black suspect and vice versa.”
Saying that the statements were relevant to the case due to hate crime allegations and evidence of racial tensions among gangs in the area, Tuesday’s unpublished decision rejects the defendant’s assertion that the comments amounted to admissions that officers with the Riverside Police Department “commonly use the race or ethnicity of a crime victim to make racist assumptions about the identity of the perpetrator.”
At issue is the Racial Justice Act of 2020 (“RJA”), found at Penal Code §745, which provides that “[t]he state shall not seek or obtain a criminal conviction…on the basis of race” and that a violation may be established by proving that “a law enforcement officer involved in the case” had “exhibited bias or animus towards the defendant because of the defendant’s race, ethnicity, or national origin.”
Officer’s Statements
Justice Frank J. Menetrez authored the opinion, joined in by Acting Presiding Justice Carol D. Codrington and Justice Richard T. Fields. Menetrez acknowledged that the officer admitted during testimony that he zeroed in on the defendant as a suspect in the fatal shooting of a Black man in part because the accused is Hispanic. However, he remarked:
“[The officer’s] statements that he considered [the defendant’s] race was an appeal to evidence properly before the jury, not an appeal to racial bias or an exhibition of racial bias. The RJA does not prohibit any and all references to the defendant’s race or ethnicity by an expert witness or law enforcement officer involved in the case.”
Asserting that his conviction was obtained in violation of the section was Steven Carrillo, who was accused of shooting at two Black men in Riverside in October 2020, killing one of the targets, Derrion Thomas. Witnesses reported that a black Jaguar had been seen in the area.
Prosecutors alleged that the victims were targeted by Carrillo, a Hispanic man who was a member of the East Side Riva gang, at least in part because of their race. Neither of the victims had ties to gangs in the area, but both were armed with firearms during the confrontation.
Racial Violence
Detective Trevor Childers of the Riverside Police Department testified as a gang expert during the murder trial and commented that the crime scene was located in an area with a history of racial violence between Hispanic and Black street gangs. He added:
“I already immediately upon hearing black Jaguar, I already suspected Mr. Carrillo. Like I said earlier, I kind of talked about how the gang issues on the east side, if you have black victims, then you’re looking for [a] Hispanic suspect. With a couple of pieces, it led me to Mr. Carrillo. The fact that I knew he drove a black Jaguar, the fact that my victims were black, I suspected it was him immediately.”
Carrillo’s attorney did not object or raise a Racial Justice Act claim at trial. A jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder and found true gang and hate-crime special circumstances, among other charges; Riverside Superior Court Judge Jerry Yang sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole in June 2024.
On appeal, Carrillo asserted that Childers’ testimony violated the RJA and that his attorney rendered ineffective legal assistance by failing to object.
Forfeited Claims
Saying that “Carrillo forfeited his RJA and due process claims by not raising them in the trial court,” Menetrez also rejected his assertion of ineffective assistance of counsel, remarking:
“[A]ny such motion would have been meritless. Defense counsel did not perform deficiently by failing to bring a meritless RJA motion.”
Commenting that “[t]he record demonstrates…that Childers’s statements were not based on racist assumptions,” he wrote:
“[T]hey were based on the undisputed evidence of longstanding racial violence and animus in the area. Childers’s statements must be read in context of that evidence and not in isolation.”
Carrillo cited the 2024 decision by the Sixth District Court of Appeal in People v. Stubblefield, which held that a prosecutor violated the RJA by suggesting that investigators declined to search the defendant’s home in part because they were concerned about looking like they were targeting him because of his race. Distinguishing the case, Menetrez wrote:
“Unlike Stubblefield, this is not a case in which the defendant’s race was entirely irrelevant or in which mention of his race served no proper purpose….As already explained, Carrillo’s race and the race of the victims were relevant to elements of the charged offenses or special circumstances.”
He added:
“In order to constitute a violation of the RJA, the challenged statements must ‘exhibit[] bias or animus’ toward the defendant because of their race or ethnicity…or ‘explicitly or implicitly appeal[] to racial bias’….That was not the case with Childers’s statements.”
Rejecting the defendant’s other claims of error, the court directed the trial judge to correct the abstract of judgment and sentencing minute order to reflect the oral pronouncement of judgment but otherwise affirmed the convictions.
The case is People v. Carrillo, E084273.
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