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.

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