In People v. Hazlett, the Supreme Court yesterday affirmed, 5-2, the conviction and death sentence of Larry Hazlett for the 1978 murder of Tana Woolley. Chief Justice Guerrero wrote for the majority. The conviction at issue arose from a cold case. Woolley was strangled in her Rosamond apartment in 1978, and DNA didn’t link Hazlett to the crime until 2000. He was tried in 2004.
Hazlett, who is Black, challenged the prosecutor’s use of his first peremptory to strike the sole remaining Black juror in the venire, after which the prosecutor immediately accepted what the parties describe as an all-White jury. The majority independently reviews the record and concludes no prima facie case of discrimination was established. More broadly, the majority holds that the Racial Justice Act of 2020 (RJA) does not apply to the exercise of peremptory challenges. The court reasons that Section 745(a)(2) prohibits bias “towards the defendant,” and striking a juror is an action directed at the juror, not the defendant. It points to legislative history showing the Legislature removed an express peremptory-challenge provision from the RJA when it simultaneously enacted Assembly Bill 3070 (Code Civ. Proc., § 231.7), which addresses bias in jury selection but applies only prospectively.
Justice Evans, joined by Justice Liu, dissents on both points. The dissent argues Hazlett made a prima facie case given that the prosecutor removed the last remaining juror of Hazlett’s race, immediately accepted an all-White jury, and tried a “highly racially fraught” capital case. On the RJA, the dissent contends the majority adopted an “unduly narrow construction” that exempts discriminatory peremptory challenges from the statute’s reach, at odds with its stated purpose. Justice Liu writes separately to argue that the prosecutor’s O.J. Simpson reference during closing argument was a “paradigmatic instance” of implicit racial bias under the RJA.
The RJA holding creates what the dissent characterizes as a gap: for defendants tried between the RJA’s effective date and the January 1, 2022 effective date of section 231.7, neither statute provides a remedy for discriminatory jury selection beyond that provided Batson v. Kentucky (1986), in which the United States Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits prosecutors from exercising peremptory challenges on the basis of race.
