An Investigation Into How Prosecutors Picked Death-Penalty Juries

One morning this past March, Aimee Solway arrived at her job at the Alameda County district attorney's office, in Oakland, California, and found about a dozen boxes piled next to her desk. Each was labelled with the name of a defendant, Ernest Dykes, and inside were the files of the prosecutors who had worked on his case. Dykes had committed a murder during the course of a robbery in 1993, when he was twenty years old, and he was convicted and sent to death row. Now fifty-one, he was still fighting his sentence.

In California, death-penalty litigation often takes decades to be resolved, and five years ago Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in the state. So last year, in an effort to ease the backlog, a few old cases were referred to a federal judge, Vince Chhabria, of the Northern District of California, for possible settlement—to see if there was a way to resentence the defendants and end their litigation. One of the cases was Dykes's.

Solway, a deputy district attorney, had been hired to review old convictions, and Dykes's case was one of her first assignments. She would need to weigh in at an upcoming settlement conference with Judge Chhabria and Dykes's lawyers, so she had ordered the trial files. She opened a box, glanced at a few of the documents, and then turned to other tasks, including a call with Dykes's attorneys. Later that day, she went back to the boxes—she was looking for the police reports—and in one of them she discovered a stack of index cards held together by a rubber band.

On the cards were handwritten notes, which Solway realized were comments about prospective jurors for Dykes's trial, presumably compiled by the prosecutors. One card described an "MW"—male, white—who was a Republican and in favor of the death penalty. That didn't seem too surprising, but a card for a Black woman read "Don't believe she could vote D/P"—for the death penalty—and characterized her as a "Short, Fat, Troll." A card for a forty-seven-year-old man said that he had a "Jewish background." Another card, for a man who had a Ph.D. in physics, read "I liked him better than any other Jew But No Way," then added, "Must Kick, too Risky."

Solway immediately knew that some of the notes posed a serious problem. Historically, prosecutors had sought to keep certain groups of people off juries who they assumed would be less likely to vote for a conviction. That practice had denied untold numbers of Americans their constitutional right to a fair trial. To counter this, the California Supreme Court, in 1978, banned striking jurors because of their race, ethnicity, or religion. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Batson v. Kentucky, prohibited prosecutors nationwide from eliminating jurors based on their race. "The harm," the Court found, "extends beyond that inflicted on the defendant and the excluded juror to touch the entire community," and the result is to "undermine public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice."

Solway knew that, if prosecutors in Dykes's case had discriminated against potential jurors, his constitutional rights had been violated. She also knew that the remedy for that sort of violation was to reverse the conviction. Given that possibility, another prosecutor might have put the index cards back in the box and tried to forget about them. Solway did not. She had previously worked at the California Appellate Project in San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that helps lawyers representing people on death row. But, because she was only a few weeks into her job at the D.A.'s office, she wasn't sure how her bosses would react to her discovery. She later recalled that she "sort of sheepishly" walked into her supervisor's office to show her the cards—and to say that she thought they should be handed over to Dykes's lawyers. Solway remembers telling her, "I don't think we can settle this case without disclosing this evidence."

Soon, the Alameda County district attorney, Pamela Y. Price, was studying the cards. Price had just become the D.A., in 2023—she was the first Black person to hold the position—and she thought the cards contained "pretty incontrovertible evidence that you're excluding Jewish people" from the jury, she later said. Her team shared the notes with Judge Chhabria, and he ordered Price to do a full review of the office's past capital convictions. At a press conference on April 22nd, Price announced, "We do have evidence of actual prosecutorial misconduct." She added, "We have notes made by prosecutors in some of the cases," as well as courtroom transcripts showing "the ways in which the jurors were questioned." The evidence "suggests plainly that many people did not receive a fair trial in Alameda County," she said. "It is something that we have to make right."

The Supreme Court determined twice in the nineteen-seventies that the death penalty was being enforced in ways that were unconstitutional. In 1977, the California legislature passed a new death-penalty bill to comply with the latest ruling, and the following year voters passed a state ballot initiative to significantly expand the list of "special circumstances" under which a prosecutor could seek the death penalty for first-degree homicide. In the next few decades, California prosecutors sent more than a thousand people to death row.

Governor Newsom declared the moratorium in 2019, but there are still more than six hundred people, including twenty women, with death sentences in California—more than in any other state. Thirty-four were prosecuted by the Alameda County D.A.'s office. They range in age from thirty-three to eighty-one. The one with the oldest case arrived on death row in 1981; the most recent was sentenced in 2016.

To comply with Chhabria's order, Price's staff searched decades-old files, identified thousands of pages of jury-selection materials, and shared them with lawyers for the defendants. Prosecutors' offices are sometimes referred to as "black boxes," because their inner workings are shielded from public view. But the old trial files in Alameda County have revealed the jury-selection tactics sometimes used in capital cases, particularly by some prosecutors assigned to an élite group known as the Death Team.

In 1980, James Anderson became the first prosecutor in the Alameda County D.A.'s office to win a death-penalty case after capital punishment was reinstated. The son of a milkman, Anderson grew up in San Francisco and joined the D.A.'s office straight out of law school, in 1969, when he was twenty-six. When the office created the Death Team, in the mid-eighties, he was assigned to it. Anderson was up by five every morning, ran five miles, and was at his desk before seven-thirty. He handled many of the most notorious murder cases, and was prone to using terms like "hyena" or "reptile" when referring to defendants during closing arguments. In a memo to a judge about one defendant, who was convicted of murdering a young woman after kidnapping, robbing, and raping her, he wrote, "An early execution is only too fitting for him."

The Death Team worked on the ninth floor of the Alameda County Courthouse, an eleven-story Art Deco structure built in the nineteen-thirties, next to Lake Merritt, in Oakland. (The county encompasses Oakland, where about a quarter of the population lives; thirteen smaller cities, including Berkeley; and several unincorporated areas.) The D.A., John J. Meehan, had his office on the ninth floor, as did many of his top officials. In the late eighties, Anderson began sharing an office with a fellow death-penalty prosecutor named John R. Quatman, known as Jack, who had spent seven years studying at a seminary before transferring to U.C. Berkeley, in 1967, and then attending law school. He was a few years younger than Anderson and, at five feet six, several inches shorter. Colleagues called him Squatman, and he often poked fun at his own height in an attempt to win over jurors—standing on his toes, for example, when he went up to speak to the judge. He and Anderson were close friends, and were among the highest-profile prosecutors in the courthouse.

Obtaining a death verdict, Anderson once said, was a "mark of distinction" in the office. As Quatman put it, "Anybody can try a homicide successfully. Not everybody can try a death-penalty case successfully." A capital prosecutor had to win twice: first at trial (persuading twelve jurors to convict a defendant of first-degree murder with a so-called special circumstance) and then during the "penalty phase" (persuading all the jurors to sentence the defendant to death). The key, Quatman said, was to pick the right jury, and the pressure to win was intense: "Every other day, the boss comes by—'How's that case going?' " Preparing for and trying a death-penalty case could take at least a year, and after Anderson or Quatman sent a defendant to death row they framed his mug shot and hung it on their office wall, next to a copy of his death verdict.

The first death-penalty case that Quatman prosecuted was that of Fred Harlan Freeman, a mechanic from Richmond, who had suffered severe hearing loss as a child. He was forty-seven years old and had been charged with fatally shooting a man during a robbery at a bar in Berkeley, in 1984. The case had seemed almost impossible to win—it was nearly three years old when Quatman got it, and the police had lost some of the evidence. And Quatman himself had misgivings about the case. He later said, "My big issue with Fred Freeman was that it never should've been a death-penalty case because he wasn't that bad a guy." (Freeman had two prior felony convictions for armed robbery, but, Quatman explained, nobody had been shot in those incidents.) He added, "We had shootings in bars every day in Oakland, and they weren't death-penalty cases." But a committee in the D.A.'s office decided which cases were capital cases, and, Quatman said, a prosecutor who questioned the committee's decision risked losing out on future death-penalty assignments.

Picking a jury in a capital case was far more onerous than in a typical homicide case. Prospective jurors had to fill out questionnaires and be interviewed individually by lawyers for both sides to determine not only whether they could be fair but whether they were "death qualified." (Those who said that they could never vote for the death penalty were dismissed, as were those who said that they would always vote for it.) This part of the process could take a couple of months, and eventually the prospective jurors who remained—perhaps a hundred people—returned to the courthouse for the second phase, known as the Big Spin. On that day, they sat together in the spectator section of the courtroom while a clerk spun a metal cannister, pulled out cards, and read off names. The first twelve people who were called took seats in the jury box.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys had the names of all the prospective jurors ahead of the Big Spin, and they learned as much as they could about them. Quatman was particularly thorough: he checked if they had ever been arrested, pulled driving records, and drove by potential jurors' homes to see if there were any bumper stickers on their cars indicating their political views. During the Big Spin, both prosecutors and defense attorneys could use an allotted number of peremptory challenges, which did not require an explanation, to remove jurors. (The allotted number at the time was twenty-six for each side.) Discrimination based on where a person lives is legally permissible, and Anderson told me, "I had a cardinal rule: if they lived in Berkeley, they were off the panel." Quatman agreed: "You didn't want those guys on the jury. They start questioning everything you do."

Prosecutors often brought notes—one index card for each juror. There wasn't enough time to read every word on every card, though, so beforehand they would assign each possible juror a score. Quatman used a scale of zero to ten. "Zero is somebody you want to get off that jury any way you can," he explained. "My rule was six and above." Each time a potential juror was removed, another took that person's seat in the jury box. The process ended when the allotted challenges ran out—or earlier, if both sides agreed on a jury.

Judge Stanley P. Golde, a revered courthouse figure known as the Maven, presided over Freeman's trial. Quatman knew Golde well; the judge had been a guest at his wedding, and Quatman was a frequent visitor to his chambers. There was always an urn of hot coffee, and lawyers gathered there to socialize, talk business, and seek Golde's counsel. In April, 1987, one day before the Big Spin began in the Freeman case, Golde permitted lawyers for both sides to eliminate a few additional jurors, though it was not the usual protocol. Freeman's attorney did so, but Quatman did not.

Afterward, in Quatman's telling, Golde called him into his chambers and said, "Quatman, what are you doing? You didn't challenge the Jew," adding, "No Jewish person could sit on a death-penalty jury and return a verdict" for death. Quatman said that Golde, who was Jewish, reminded him that after the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann had been captured in Argentina, in 1960, Israelis were divided on whether he should be executed. Quatman responded, "Say no more."

Before the trial began, Quatman removed three potential jurors he thought might be Jewish. In the end, he prevailed: the jury convicted Freeman, then voted to send him to death row. (Later, Quatman said that the verdict was "due more to the defense attorneys' incompetence than to my efforts," citing their "substandard" case during the penalty phase, which seemed "thrown together in a haphazard fashion.")

According to Quatman, his fellow-prosecutors often made a point of striking Black jurors, too, especially women, in cases in which the defendant was Black. In 1991, Anderson prosecuted three men; one of them, a white insurance agent, had allegedly hired the other two, both of whom were Black, to kill his ex-wife. During the Big Spin, eleven Black people were called to the jury box, and Anderson removed nine of them. He won two death verdicts—for the ex-husband and for one of the hired men. (The other man got life without parole.)

Anderson was named the head of the Death Team in 1991. Quatman was no longer a member; he had been made a supervisor, overseeing a team of felony-trial prosecutors. In June, 1992, the D.A.'s office sent a group of prosecutors to attend a three-day seminar on trying death-penalty cases, organized by the California District Attorneys Association. Quatman, who by then had won three death verdicts, was one of the speakers; his topic was jury selection. He prepared a four-page outline that included notes about the sorts of people he didn't want as jurors, because he thought they might be too empathetic (psychiatrists, nurses, doctors), and those he did want (women over forty, blue-collar workers).

The seminar was held at Humphreys Half Moon Inn, in San Diego, and was attended by a couple of hundred people, representing district attorneys' offices around the state. Quatman, near the end of his presentation, shared a piece of advice that was not in his outline. As one colleague, Colton Carmine, later put it, "He prefaced his remarks by saying, 'I know I probably shouldn't say this, and I'm probably going to get in trouble.' " But then, Carmine added, "he said, 'Never, ever leave a Jewish person on a capital jury. It's just not fair to the case, and it's not fair to the jurors, given what's happened to them in the past, to ask them to execute another human being by lethal gas.' " (At the time, California used a gas chamber for executions.)

Yet even though Quatman had publicly encouraged fellow-prosecutors to violate a defendant's right to a fair trial, he was not reprimanded. His boss, Thomas J. Orloff, then a chief assistant to the D.A., later said that nobody told him about Quatman's comments. The California District Attorneys Association, in fact, sent Quatman a thank-you letter, noting that the "attendees seemed to have benefited from the instruction." By the next year, however, Quatman was no longer working in the courthouse. While speaking to a judge in his chambers, Quatman had used a sexist slur to refer to a female prosecutor on his trial team. Another lawyer overheard him, and soon everyone in D.A.'s office knew about it. Quatman was later transferred to the office's consumer-fraud unit, in a building six miles away, and he blamed Orloff for what he saw as a demotion. (Orloff told me that John Meehan, who has since died, "was the D.A. then and made the decision." But Orloff defended the transfer: "I mean, here's a guy you've got doing criminal cases who is a total loose cannon.")

Anderson oversaw the Death Team until 2004, when he retired, at the age of sixty-one, after thirty-four years in the D.A.'s office. A headline in the Oakland Tribune read "A passionate foe of killers cedes stage." Anderson had "gotten more murderers condemned to execution than any other prosecutor in California history"—ten death verdicts, the story reported. " 'There was nothing we couldn't get away with,' Anderson said with a mischievous smirk. 'We cut a wide swathe through things, but we produced a lot of results.' "

On March 22, 2005, Jack Quatman was back in a courtroom in the Bay Area, but this time he was on the witness stand. As unlikely as it seemed, he was testifying at a hearing on behalf of Fred Freeman. Quatman's wife, Phyllis, who had worked as a prosecutor in a neighboring county, was in the courtroom that day, too. She remembers seeing her husband's former colleagues "staring at us like we were traitors to the team," as she put it years later. "And we were traitors to the team. There's no question, I guess."

After five years in the consumer-fraud unit, Quatman had grown frustrated, and he quit in 1998. He and Phyllis had two young children, and, at her prompting, they moved to Whitefish, Montana, a town of five thousand in the Rocky Mountains, sixty miles from the Canadian border. The couple opened a law practice there. Phyllis also represented a man on death row in California, handling his state habeas petition. (Once defendants have exhausted their direct appeal, they can file a habeas petition in state court, challenging their conviction or their sentence, or both, and if they lose they can file one in federal court. With such a large death row, California often relies on habeas attorneys from out of state.) In March, 2003, Scott F. Kauffman, a lawyer with the California Appellate Project, travelled to Whitefish to help Phyllis with her petition, and she invited him to their home for dinner.

That evening, Quatman and Kauffman got to talking, and the two men finished a bottle of wine, then opened another. The conversation eventually turned to Alameda County. Quatman spoke about his days in the D.A.'s office and his first death-penalty trial—Fred Freeman's—and his uneasiness about it. He also mentioned that, before the trial had started, Judge Golde, who had died in 1998, suggested that he not keep any Jewish jurors.

Kauffman knew one of the attorneys handling Freeman's habeas petition, Gary D. Sowards, and he asked Quatman if he could pass along his comments. Quatman agreed, and Sowards soon met with him in Montana, then sent him a declaration recapping their meeting and asked him to sign it. The declaration stated that "Fred Freeman did not fit the real-world standard for one deserving the death penalty"; that his lawyers had been "worse than ineffective"; that in the Alameda D.A.'s office it had been "standard practice to exclude Jewish jurors in death cases"; and that, in this case, Golde had reminded Quatman to do so.

Quatman initially balked at signing. Friends and other attorneys advised him not to sign—not to break ranks with his former colleagues. But Phyllis saw it differently. She recalled telling him, "You have to do this because this man's life is on the line, and he didn't get a fair trial, and this"—the unethical striking of jurors—"is endemic in your office." She added, "You have a moral duty to tell the truth." In late May, 2003, Quatman signed the declaration.

In July, 2004, the California Supreme Court ordered an evidentiary hearing in Freeman's case, focussed on Quatman's claims about excluding jurors—and the backlash began. Anderson told a reporter that Quatman's claims were "ludicrous." As Anderson later said to me, "People just couldn't believe that he would suddenly become a turncoat, so to speak, and try and damage the office by making these allegations." He added, "I mean, you've been in the office for so long and all of a sudden just turn against it because you had a falling out with the boss?" That theory, that Quatman was driven by a grudge, was pervasive in the D.A.'s office.

Orloff, who had become the district attorney in 1994, put a prosecutor named Morris D. Jacobson in charge of the "Quatman investigation," as it was known. On November 16, 2004, Jacobson and a few staff members met to strategize. According to notes from the meeting, which District Attorney Price's office released in October, the participants discussed the "sensitive nature of case and need for confidentiality." The notes also read "Left it w/ Morris saying he would give us direction. Wants to find dirt on Quatman."

Jacobson interviewed prosecutors who had worked with Quatman to determine who might be called to testify at the hearing—and an inspector from the D.A.'s office went to Montana to speak with lawyers who knew him there. The California Supreme Court appointed Kevin J. Murphy, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge who had previously worked as a prosecutor, to oversee the hearing. Freeman's legal team, which included Sowards and three other lawyers, argued that it was a conflict of interest for the D.A.'s office to represent itself, so lawyers from the state attorney general's office wound up defending the office in court.

Six days before the hearing began, the New York Times published a story about Quatman's allegations. Anderson gave the reporter, Dean E. Murphy, a quote that was perhaps more revealing than he intended. Murphy wrote that, according to Anderson, "many prospective jurors, including Jews and blacks, were excluded because of backgrounds, professions and political beliefs. 'That is not a racist thing, but just common sense,' Mr. Anderson said. 'It is an axiom. It is not because of prejudice. Their politics are not going to be on your side.' "

The hearing, however, did not focus on whether there was a pattern of Alameda prosecutors striking certain groups of people from death-penalty juries. The California Supreme Court had stipulated that the proceeding should focus on just two questions: Had Judge Golde advised Quatman to strike Jews from the jury in the Freeman case? And had Quatman done so on his advice? (Ordering an evidentiary hearing with such a narrow focus was not unusual for the California Supreme Court.)

Quatman took the stand on the first day, and the attorney representing the D.A.'s office asked why he had struck the three potential jurors he thought were Jewish. "Because you wanted to win, right?" the attorney said. "That's correct," Quatman replied. The attorney also asked why he didn't report Golde's comments to anyone. "Judge Golde was considered the dean of the courthouse," Quatman said. "I don't think anyone would have believed me, and I would have been transferred and spent the rest of my career in Livermore Muni Court."

Some of the attorneys who testified defended Golde, who, it was noted, was no longer alive to defend himself. Before becoming a judge, he had been a successful defense attorney, whose clients included a former mayor of Oakland, protesters involved with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and an Oakland Raiders wide receiver. One attorney described Golde as "my adviser," adding, "He was probably that to many people."

The hearing, which lasted five days, subsequently turned into a referendum on Quatman's character. A few lawyers were brought in from Montana, but their complaints were fairly petty, and one said that Quatman had "a good reputation for truth and honesty." Yet eight current and former Alameda County prosecutors testified, and many recounted unethical acts that he had allegedly committed, such as failing to hand over documents to defense attorneys and coaching a trial witness by leaving a photograph of a person whom he wanted the witness to identify "in plain view on his desk." A former colleague described Quatman as "willing to bend or break rules to win more than any prosecutor should be."

Colton Carmine, who joined the D.A.'s office in 1979, testified about the 1992 seminar where Quatman advised prosecutors against picking Jews for capital juries. He said of Quatman's remarks, "I don't think it's an ethical statement to make." One of the last people to testify was James Anderson. Freeman's attorney asked him if Golde had ever advised him on which jurors to strike. "Nope, never did," Anderson answered. The attorney then tried to ask whether "there were certain axioms in the office about who should be on a jury," but Judge Murphy cut him off, after the defense objected.

Near the end of the hearing, a lawyer from the attorney general's office reiterated the theory that Quatman had made his allegations out of anger, and Murphy seemed to find that argument persuasive. He ruled in favor of the D.A.'s office, declaring, "Mr. Quatman's allegations about Judge Stanley Golde and the alleged incident" are "not true." He added, "I also concluded from the evidence that Mr. Quatman is dishonest and unethical."

This past spring, when Aimee Solway found the juror notes from Ernest Dykes's trial, the D.A.'s office looked to see which prosecutors had handled the case. Carmine had tried it. (He is retired and did not respond to requests for an interview.) Jacobson assisted during the jury-selection process. Now a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court, he declined to be interviewed, saying in an e-mail that he is "not permitted to comment on pending litigation." (After Price released the notes from the 2004 meeting, Jacobson denied any wrongdoing, telling the Daily Journal, "There was no cover-up.") In 2009, Freeman died in prison, at the age of sixty-nine.

When Pamela Price moved into the D.A.'s office, in 2023, she learned that her desk had once belonged to Earl Warren, the former Chief Justice of the United States, who served as the Alameda County D.A. from 1925 to 1938. The executive offices needed renovating, so Price decided to set up an office in a building across from the Oakland Coliseum where some other prosecutors worked—and she took Warren's desk with her. When I met her there, last summer, a quote from Maya Angelou hung on her office wall: "As long as you are breathing, it's never too late to do some good."

Price had not known the name Jack Quatman, but after she started reviewing her office's history of jury-selection practices in capital cases, and discovered the 2005 hearing, she came to her own conclusion. "It was very clear they had circled the wagons around the misconduct," she said. "The strategy was to discredit Mr. Quatman, despite the fact that—as one of my deputies pointed out—he had been a long-term valued member of this office for decades. And then, suddenly, they all decided that he was the biggest liar." She added that the allegations of juror discrimination in capital cases were "a problem that has not been examined or considered credibly in this office. And we are going to do it."

Unlike her predecessors, Price had not previously been a prosecutor. Now sixty-eight, she grew up in Ohio, spent time in foster care, attended Yale and then Berkeley Law, and ran her own civil-rights law firm, in Oakland, where her clients included female prison guards who successfully sued the state after alleging that they had been sexually harassed at work. Price was elected D.A. as part of the progressive-prosecutor movement, which began in 2015 in an effort to address inequities in the criminal-justice system and to end mass incarceration by taking a less punitive approach.

But, by the time Price was sworn in, the movement had lost its momentum, and critics soon accused her of not being punitive enough. She was blamed for Oakland's high crime rate and has received a barrage of negative press coverage, including a recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle about her office's failure to meet a one-year deadline to file charges in hundreds of misdemeanor cases, which allowed the alleged perpetrators to go unpunished. In 2022, a recall vote had led to the ouster of the progressive San Francisco D.A., Chesa Boudin. On November 5th, Price herself faced such a vote, and lost by a margin of about two to one. She is expected to be removed from office in December, once the vote tally is certified.

In November, 2023, before the juror cards were discovered in Dykes's case, a federal judge appointed two habeas lawyers—Brian Pomerantz, who is based in North Carolina, and Ann-Kathryn Tria, of Los Angeles—to represent Dykes in settlement conferences. Pomerantz, who was made the lead counsel, already had two clients from Alameda County in prison with death sentences, and he had long suspected that something had gone wrong in the Alameda D.A.'s office. One client was a man named Charles Stevens, who in 1993 was convicted of killing four people and attempting to kill another six, and whose case Pomerantz described as "the worst Batson violation in Alameda County," referring to the Supreme Court decision. During the Big Spin in Stevens's case, the prosecutor, Kenneth Burr, dismissed six out of six Jews and seven of nine Black people who were called to the jury box. In 1997, Burr was appointed as a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court. (He died in 2023.)

In March, Pomerantz and Tria joined Solway on a Zoom call to discuss Dykes's case. The facts of his crime were that, on the afternoon of July 26, 1993, Dykes, who was unemployed, started drinking malt liquor, and then tried to rob his landlady, Bernice Clark, with a gun while she sat in her Oldsmobile in the parking lot of his apartment building, in East Oakland. A bullet was fired and hit her in the neck, then struck and killed her nine-year-old grandson, Lance, who was seated beside her. Dykes later claimed that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was trying to grab Clark's wallet from her, and that he had not intended to shoot anyone. After a story in the Oakland Tribune named him as a suspect, he surrendered to the police.

There was nothing in the court transcript to suggest that prosecutors had discriminated against prospective jurors before Dykes's trial. But, near the end of the Zoom call, Pomerantz complained to Solway about her office's history of violating Batson. He recalled telling her, "Your office has been dirty for forty years. You know it and I know it. If your D.A. really wants to be a progressive prosecutor, go into the files."

It was later that same day that Solway found the stack of index cards, and later that week she e-mailed Pomerantz and Tria thirty-one pages of notes, some from the cards and some from yellow legal pads that she had also found in the boxes. Pomerantz read the notes in disbelief. "For ten years, I've been chasing this," he told me, "looking at stuff from different Alameda cases and trying to prove pattern and practice, and suddenly it was all here."

This spring, when Judge Chhabria ordered Price's office to review its juror-selection files in capital cases, he appointed Pomerantz and Tria to assist with distributing them to the lawyers representing the defendants. Pomerantz hired a team of professionals to scan the documents at the D.A.'s office, and he and Tria collected some sixty thousand pages, which included juror questionnaires and prosecutors' notes. They received eleven thousand pages related to Dykes's case, including about two hundred lengthy juror questionnaires; in another case, they got only fourteen pages. For twelve of the cases, they were told that the jury-selection documents were not found.

For the capital cases prosecuted by James Anderson—six were still being litigated—most or all of the jury-selection materials seemed to be missing. Anderson told me that he had a practice of keeping only the documents that the office needed to handle appeals, and of getting rid of his "work product," including notes that he had taken on jurors and witnesses, as well as personal items, such as thank-you notes from victims' relatives. "We were told to purge the files" of work product, he said, because the office had limited storage space. "It wasn't anything to try to deceive people." (Quatman said that there was no official protocol; some prosecutors kept their notes, and others did not.)

Pomerantz and Tria studied the documents for weeks. "I've seen a lot of disturbing things," Tria told me. Prosecutors sometimes wrote notes about potential jurors that had nothing to do with their views. One card described a white woman from San Leandro as "Attractive for Age." (She was forty-eight.) Another card noted that a nineteen-year-old woman had come to court wearing a "denim long dress slit up side." On another, someone wrote that a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Pleasanton was "cute" and "Loves Animals" and that, as to the likelihood of her voting for a death verdict, "She can do it!"

Reporters began calling Pomerantz and asking questions, including whether the sort of prosecutorial misconduct uncovered in the Dykes case, during the nineteen-nineties, had continued. Before long, he had an answer: he and Tria found evidence showing that Alameda County prosecutors had been documenting which potential jurors were Jewish or Black into the two-thousands. A list from 2008, for example, consisted of summaries of potential jurors and the phrase "Juror is African American" in bold type next to certain names—"clearly trying to make it stand out," Pomerantz said.

In July, I met with Pomerantz at his home, in North Carolina. When I arrived, he was standing in his driveway, talking on the phone to Dykes. A few minutes later, Pomerantz handed me the phone. I asked Dykes what he remembered about his trial. "I had no understanding of what was going on," he said. "But I can tell you what I do remember—just looking forward, not making eye contact with no one. Just staring at that flag that was over the judge, counting the stars."

Dykes had been on death row for decades at San Quentin, the oldest prison in California, with the rest of the state's condemned men. But Governor Newsom had recently ordered the death row dismantled, and the men were moved to other prisons. This spring, Dykes was transferred to a facility in Stockton. When his settlement negotiations started, he thought that his sentence might be changed to life without parole. But, when Pomerantz told him about the juror notes, he began to hope for a better settlement: a sentence that would allow him to go before the parole board and, perhaps one day, to get out of prison. "Maybe I can get twenty-five to life," he recalled telling himself. In fact, it was starting to look as if his sentence might be reduced to just a little more time than he had already served. He sounded shocked by the possibility. "I try not to think ahead," he said, "because to do so would be catastrophic in a sense, at least for me."

Several men at Dykes's prison had been following his case in the news, but, he said, he tried not to discuss his situation with anyone. "There was one individual who came up to me one day—he actually wanted to shake my hand," he said. "I didn't know how to process that, because I know what I did, and I am very remorseful for that." He added, "I took the life of a little boy. . . . And for an individual to come up to me and congratulate me because I happened to slip on a banana peel, as far as my trial—I can't be happy about that."

Jack Quatman is now seventy-eight and retired, and he and Phyllis still live in Montana. This summer, I visited them at their home, a modern single-story house with floor-to-ceiling windows. We sat at a long wooden table, from where we could see a neighbor's horses grazing nearby. A few months earlier, Phyllis said, she had received an e-mail from Scott Kauffman, the lawyer who had come to dinner in 2003. He had sent her an about Price's press conference announcing the discovery of the notes in Dykes's case. Now, finally, there was evidence to confirm Quatman's allegations about the office's jury-selection practices. The news had stunned them, but neither evinced a sense of satisfaction. "Somebody said, 'Don't you want to take a victory lap?' " Quatman told me. "No, I don't want to take any laps."

It was apparent, though, that he still loved to talk about his days as a prosecutor. "I liked the pressure," he said. "I liked the fact that the bell went off and you had to perform." By his count, he had tried at least two hundred cases, including some twenty homicides and the three capital cases. I asked the Quatmans if they wanted to look at some of the juror notes from the Dykes case, and, for the next hour or so, they read them on my laptop. One card stated that a would-be juror was from Texas. ("You want to keep that guy—he's from the express-lane death-penalty state," Quatman said.) Another stated that an individual had previously served on a jury that had voted to acquit. ("Goodbye.") When Quatman saw the two cards that identified prospective jurors as Jews—including the one that read "Must Kick, too Risky"—he said, "I don't know what he was thinking. You don't put the reasons down on the card that you take to court. You just grade him."

Though it had been nearly twenty years since Quatman testified at Freeman's hearing, Phyllis spoke about that day as if it had just happened. "He was sick to his stomach. And he just said, 'I just don't think I should do this. How can I turn against my old office?' " she recalled. "He'd been there twenty-five years. That was like a family." After the hearing, "there was literally no one in the office who would talk to him," she said. "There was a lot of regret on Jack's part because of the backlash." She told me, "I will take the blame for it, because I'm the one that pushed him and said, 'You need to do this.' " But, she added, "I don't regret it."

Throughout the spring and summer, Judge Chhabria oversaw a series of settlement conferences, with prosecutors from the D.A.'s office and the attorney general's office and with lawyers for the defendants, to try to negotiate resolutions in twelve capital cases from Alameda County. The discovery of the notes in Dykes's case had given the defendants new leverage. Habeas attorneys who might previously have accepted a life-without-parole deal were now looking for something better. For the D.A.'s office, the stakes were clear: if a defendant was allowed to keep litigating his case, and there was strong evidence of constitutional violations at his trial, the conviction risked being overturned.

That's what happened in the case of Curtis Lee Ervin, who had been prosecuted by James Anderson in 1991. (Ervin was the man convicted of murder after an insurance agent had hired him and another man to kill his ex-wife. Both of his co-defendants are dead. At the trial, Anderson had removed nine of the eleven Black potential jurors.) The attorney general's office responds to habeas petitions filed in federal court, and for decades it had defended the work of Alameda's capital prosecutors. But this summer the A.G.'s office conducted a full "comparative juror analysis" in Ervin's case—examining the answers given by all the prospective jurors to determine whether race had been a factor in removing any of them. At the end of July, the A.G.'s office submitted to Chhabria a Notice of Concession of Error stating that "Batson was violated in this case. Ervin is entitled to a new trial."

Chhabria vacated Ervin's conviction on August 1st, and a few days later District Attorney Price held a press conference in which she apologized to the victim's relatives, saying that "because of prosecutorial misconduct, because of the failure of the supervisors of Mr. Anderson and so many failures over the years," the family was having to endure the trauma of "having this whole situation once again brought up." Price had sixty days to decide whether to retry Ervin or to release him. He is now seventy-one, relies on a walker, and has been incarcerated for thirty-eight years. She chose to prosecute him again, and he remained incarcerated, awaiting a new trial. Last month, however, her office changed course and offered him a deal that, if he pleaded guilty or no contest to a lesser charge, would allow him to get out of prison next year. He accepted.

The settlement conferences, in federal court, were confidential—participants were not permitted to discuss what happened there—but the resentencing proceedings have taken place in the courtroom of Judge Thomas E. Stevens, of the Alameda County Superior Court, at the same courthouse where Anderson and Quatman tried their capital cases. The proceedings have been extremely emotional at times, with family members standing up in Stevens's courtroom to voice confusion, shock, distress, and anger that the person who killed their loved one might have his sentence changed. In the case of a man named Maurice Boyette, who shot and killed two people in 1992, at the age of nineteen, a relative of one of the victims told Stevens that it seemed as if the families, not the prosecutors, were being punished for prosecutors' misdeeds.

James Anderson is now eighty-one and lives in a nearby county, where he drives an Alfa Romeo with a license plate that reads "190PC"—a reference to the California penal code for first-degree murder. When I called him to ask about Ervin's case, he said, "How could I have done something wrong" when the jury sentenced two of the co-defendants—"a white guy and a Black guy"—to death but "spared another Black guy," giving him a life sentence, "because he really wasn't the one on the initial contract?" Anderson added, "Tell me that's not a fair jury." He insisted that he had just one consideration when picking jurors in a capital case: "Do you have the guts to do this—look the guy in the eye and say, 'I sentence you to death'?" He said, "It's got nothing to do with race, creed, or color."

In July, another man Anderson sent to death row, Keith Thomas—about whom Anderson had said, "An early execution is only too fitting"—was also resentenced, to twenty-three years to life. "I think they're going after me because I've got the most capital verdicts in the state," Anderson said. "I'm pretty proud of what I did, and I'm very upset with the way Miss Price is trying to undo hard work, which I think was fairly done." He added, "I think she's doing it just because of race." When I asked him what he meant, he said, "Because the people that she's trying to undo the cases—the defendants' races are Black." He went on, "I don't see her trying to undo cases of the white defendants I've convicted." ("All of the cases under review are not only Black defendants," Price said, in response. "Mr. Anderson is not well informed.")

In recent months, some of the defendants' attorneys worried that if Price were recalled her successor would be less committed to resentencing their clients. As the election drew closer, the pace of proceedings picked up, with four taking place in the last ten days of October. So far, of the thirty-four defendants from Alameda County who were in prison with death sentences this spring, fourteen have been resentenced.

Ernest Dykes learned his fate at his resentencing, which took place on August 13th. Kristie Clark Trias, the older sister of the boy Dykes killed, had planned to attend but changed her mind. In a letter to Judge Stevens, she wrote, "My absence from these proceedings does not mean that we no longer care about the outcome. It is a way for me to protect myself from the overwhelming pain."

Pomerantz and Tria were both present in Stevens's courtroom, as was Solway. Dykes followed the proceedings on Zoom from Stockton. In the courtroom, he appeared on a large screen, wearing a blue inmate's uniform and glasses. Recapping the history of Dykes's case, Solway said that her discovery of the notes had been "a bit of a random event" and that "what popped out was immediately recognizable evidence of constitutional violations at trial." She pointed to the fact that Dykes had been just twenty at the time of his crime and that he had suffered "childhood trauma." In her view, "what would have been fair" was a sentence of twenty-five to life. "And Mr. Dykes has now served over thirty years," she said. As a condition of his resentencing, a psychologist had met with him earlier to determine whether he was a threat to public safety. Solway said the psychologist found that "there is precious little reason to believe that the defendant will return to a life of crime."

When it was Pomerantz's turn to speak, he agreed that Solway's discovery "came through random circumstances," but, he said, "it was not a random event, in that their office did what previous administrations would not do"—dig into the allegations of Batson violations to determine their extent. He added, "The documents that came out in Mr. Dykes's case have been there the whole time. They have been sitting there the whole time, and no one else wanted to see what was there." Pomerantz made it clear that he thought there might be further ramifications for the prosecutors involved in this case and others, and he mentioned that the State Bar of California, which disciplines attorneys, had contacted him and Tria. (He had sent the State Bar documents from capital cases handled by seven Alameda County prosecutors.)

The proceeding lasted nearly an hour. At times, Pomerantz and Tria looked up at the screen on the side of the courtroom and saw that their client was getting emotional, taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes. Near the end, Judge Stevens said that he would grant the D.A.'s request for a new prison sentence—thirty-one years and nine months—as long as Dykes agreed to waive his right to appeal. "Does your client agree to that?" Stevens asked.

"Yes, Your Honor," Tria said.

On the screen, Dykes gave a thumbs-up. He will be released from prison in the spring.