The Patriot Post® · Mac Donald Warns of a Crime Catastrophe

You’ve heard the cliché: As goes California, so goes the nation. We’re not sure it’s true anymore, given what an awful one-party mess that state has become in little more than a generation.

Still, as Michael Anton wrote in his prescient book on the 2020 presidential race, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, “With apologies to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, America’s bicoastal oligarchs and tastemakers celebrate ‘Californification’ as a heady brew of technological innovation, economic futurism, environmental consciousness, social enlightenment, and political progressivism.”

It’s these last two, though — the “enlightenment” and the “progressivism” — that have combined to make the state a lawless wasteland. And the indomitable Heather Mac Donald has taken notice.

“California is about to demonstrate what a world constructed from the tenets of critical race studies looks like,” she writes at City Journal in an article titled “California’s Looming Crime Catastrophe,” which warns about the recent passage of a law that “will likely bring the state’s criminal-justice system to its knees.” Mac Donald continues: “The Racial Justice Act, passed in 2020 without meaningful public review, turns long-standing academic tropes about implicit bias and white privilege into potent legal tools. And the floodgates are about to open. Starting this year, the RJA allows anyone serving time in a California prison or jail for a felony to challenge his conviction and sentencing retroactively on the ground of systemic racial bias.”

In essence, then, the RJA was a ticking time bomb. And now it joins the growing list of disparate-impact racial excuse-making that is wrecking our country.

Mac Donald’s piece begins with an account of a series of gang-related murders in Contra Costa County, whose four perpetrators were ultimately caught and sentenced to life without parole. Their sentences were recently thrown out by a superior court judge on the grounds that the county’s sentencing for black gang members had been “historically biased.” Mind you: Neither the convicted murderers nor their legal representatives said they’d been treated unfairly by the judicial system. But, racial bias. Mac Donald explains:

The Racial Justice Act operationalizes the proposition that every aspect of the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks. But according to the act’s legislative authors, it’s too hard to prove such bias in the case of individual arrests and prosecutions. Therefore, the act does away with the concept of individual fault and individual proof. From now on, statistics about past convictions are sufficient to invalidate a present trial or sentence.

The RJA explicitly repudiates a key Supreme Court precedent that had governed bias challenges in criminal trials. The plaintiff in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), Warren McCleskey, a black man, was facing the death penalty for murdering a white police officer in Fulton County, Georgia. McCleskey presented a study purportedly showing that killers of all races in Georgia were more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white. Blacks who killed whites were at greatest risk of capital punishment. That alleged historical disparity in sentencing invalidated his own death sentence, argued McCleskey. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, disagreed.

In McCleskey, the High Court ruled that defendants must show that the system was “purposefully biased against them,” not just historically biased, in order to overturn a conviction under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause. But that specific proof of bias is no longer necessary — at least not in California. All that’s necessary for turning black murderers loose in Gavin Newsom’s crime-plagued state are statistics that show a pattern of past bias.

So now, as Mac Donald notes, based on a dubious statistical analysis, not only are the four aforementioned gangster-murderers entitled to new sentencing, “but all 30 black gang convicts in the historical pool who had received life without parole can now sue to reopen their sentences thanks to the RJA’s retroactivity provision.”

This is madness, of course, but it’s the reality in our nation’s largest and most consequential state — unless the voters revolt en masse and overturn the Racial Justice Act. In the meantime, the question for the rest of us is whether we as a nation have reached Peak California.

By now, we suspect that the citizens of the other 50 states have stared into the leftist abyss that was once the Golden State and said, No thanks. Time will tell. But if so, it might be that the Racial Justice Act was the last straw.