California’s Landmark Racial Bias Challenge to the Death Penalty Moves Forward

A first-of-its-kind law­suit chal­leng­ing California’s death penal­ty on sys­temic racial grounds has cleared an ini­tial hur­dle at the California Supreme Court and is now head­ed to an evi­den­tiary hear­ing in Sacramento Superior Court, accord­ing to report­ing from the Washington Post. The suit argues that California’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because of the racial dis­par­i­ties in how it operates statewide.