Friday, September 18, 2026
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C.A. Jurist Bemoans Supreme Court’s Recent Opinion on RJA
Justice Jon B. Streeter Pens 49-Page Concurrence Arguing That High Court Took Wrong Turn Last Month By Declaring That Retroactive 2020 Racial Justice Law Is Not Vehicle to Challenge Bias in Jury Selection
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Justice Jon B. Streeter of Div. Four of the First District Court of Appeal has penned a nearly 50-page concurring opinion to decry last month’s decision by the California Supreme Court in People v. Hazlett, in which the high court declared that a retroactive piece of legislation that was adopted in 2020 to try to eliminate racial prejudice in the criminal justice system is not an appropriate vehicle for challenging biases in the jury selection process.
Streeter joined in the opinion of the court, which was filed on Wednesday, acknowledging that the panel was bound by Hazlett to find that a defendant was foreclosed from challenging his 2005 assault and mayhem convictions under the Racial Justice Act of 2020 (“RJA”) based on allegations that the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to kick the only two Black potential jurors from the panel. However, he wrote:
“While I concur under compulsion of Hazlett, I write to express agreement with Justice [Kelli] Evans’s Hazlett dissent. Nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of Chief Justice [Patricia] Guerrero’s treatment of the cognizability of race-based peremptory challenges under the RJA—she speaks for the court on this issue with characteristic precision and balance—but because there are some considerations in play here that neither side argued in Hazlett…, I think it is worthwhile to add some perspectives that may bear on whether legislative clarification is in order.”
Hazlett is significant because it holds that current challenges asserting racial bias in the jury selection process must be addressed through Code of Civil Procedure 231.7, a law that was also adopted in 2020 to address concerns of unconscious prejudice but, unlike the RJA, was not made retroactive by the Legislature.
Old Framework
As a result, courts addressing claims of discrimination in voir dire processes that pre-date the RJA must do so through the old so-called “Batson/Wheeler” framework under which a defendant must raise a prima facie case of bias before the prosecutor is asked to provide racially-neutral reasons for the strike. That scheme requires a finding of discriminatory intent, which is irrelevant under the unconscious-bias focused RJA.
The question arose after Monte Haney, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after a jury found him guilty on multiple charges arising from an assault on his then-girlfriend during which he stabbed her and ripped out one of her eyes, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in 2024 based on the alleged RJA violation.
While the petition was pending, the high court decided Hazlett, and the appellate panel declared, in Wednesday’s opinion authored by Presiding Justice Tracie L. Brown:
“Because Haney’s petition alleges only that the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges to dismiss all prospective African American jurors from his jury violated the RJA, without any additional allegations that the prosecutor exhibited bias in some other fashion, we will issue a separate order denying this claim with prejudice.”
Brown noted that Haney also raised an RJA claim based on a white juror saying before opening statements, “This guy is going away,” and sought statistical discovery from the country regarding the treatment of defendants of other races who were accused of similar crimes. She added:
“[W]e will deny Haney’s [other] claims and discovery request on the merits but without prejudice to him filing a more limited version of his discovery request in the superior court.”
Foreclosed From Relief
In his concurrence, Streeter, a former president of the State Bar of California, argued:
“In this case, Haney, who claims that all African American prospective jurors were swept from his jury by prosecutorial peremptory strike, was foreclosed from pursuing a Batson/Wheeler claim in federal court because of his counsel’s failure to object on that ground in a timely manner….We will never know whether, by invoking the RJA, he might have been able to prove the allegation of racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges he makes in these…proceedings, but I think he should have been allowed to try.”
The jurist rejected the reading of the RJA, promoted by lawyers with the Attorney General’s office and adopted by the high court, that the statutory scheme, which by its terms prohibits “exhibit[ions of] bias or animus towards the defendant,” excludes racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges from its ambit because that asserted prejudice would be aimed at prospective jurors rather than the accused. He wrote:
“To cut to the heart of the matter upfront, my short answer to the Attorney General’s textual analysis is that, if we trace the full evolution of the law of jury discrimination, the injury caused by race-based use of peremptory challenges is the deprivation of the defendant’s right to a fair and impartial jury….Taking that as the background law the Legislature understood to be applicable when it passed the RJA, I conclude that we are dealing with conduct directed ‘towards’ the defendant.”
He acknowledged that Evans, in her dissent in Hazlett, argued that the majority opinion created a carve-out to the RJA that was unsupported by the legislative history but said that “there is more to say on the topic” before launching into a 28-page elicitation of the history of jurisprudence addressing discrimination in the jury selection process.
Lessons From History
Saying that the “pertinent history” reveals “some lessons…that help illuminate the statutory question before us,” he pointed out that courts have long recognized that the use of peremptory strikes is “only the latest in a long line of discretionary tools available to any prosecutor who seeks to tap perceived racial biases as a way to gain advantage in criminal cases.” He continued:
“California was once a leader in attacking this problem. A decade before Batson, our Supreme Court adopted a reading of article I, section 16 of the California Constitution under which the race-based use of peremptory challenges by a prosecutor directly harms the defendant—and is therefore an act taken ‘towards’ the defendant ‘based on his race’—because it deprives him of a fair and impartial jury. That has important implications for purposes of our statutory interpretation inquiry here.”
He added:
“It is a mistake to assume that, in the summer of 2020, the Legislature wished to address race-based peremptory challenges solely by tinkering with Batson’s mode of equal protection analysis….[I]t seems evident to me the Legislature had more in mind at that moment in time. For many decades in the law of race discrimination in jury selection,…there has been an ongoing debate in the high court’s equal protection jurisprudence about discriminatory impact evidence versus evidence of discriminatory intent. It seems to me the Legislature has aligned California in favor of the impact side of this debate.”
Streeter declared:
“Time will tell whether, in the view of the Legislature, this ahistorical statutory interpretation position—which is now the law, after Hazlett—is consistent with the level of judicial commitment to uprooting racial bias in criminal cases that the Legislature has repeatedly stated in legislative findings it wants to see in the application of the RJA.”
In a footnote to Wednesday’s opinion for the court, Brown said:
“We publish this introductory portion of the opinion to give context to Justice Streeter’s separate concurrence.”
The case is In re Haney, A170412.
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