Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., the founding board chair of EJS, established the Institute in 2005 to honor and continue the work of one of the great civil rights lawyers of the twentieth century.

Preview the conference agenda

Eric Yamamoto, also a founding board member of EJS, and Susan Serrano, EJS’s founding research director, are also scheduled to speak at the conference. Eric is the Fred T. Korematsu Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law. Susan is the Director of Educational Development, Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law at the same law school.

“Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law” – edited by Justin D. Levinson, University of Hawaii School of Law, and Robert J. Smith, University of North Carolina School of Law – is a book for anyone who wonders why race still matters and is interested in what emerging social science can contribute to the discussion.

Despite cultural progress in reducing overt acts of racism, stark racial disparities continue to define American life. This conference considers what emerging social science can contribute to the discussion of race in American law, policy, and society.

The conference will explore how scientific evidence on the human mind might help to explain why racial equality is so elusive. This new evidence reveals how human mental machinery can be skewed by lurking stereotypes, often bending to accommodate hidden biases reinforced by years of social learning.

Through the lens of these powerful and pervasive implicit racial attitudes and stereotypes, the conference, designed to coincide with the launch of the book “Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law”, examines both the continued subordination of historically disadvantaged groups and the legal system’s complicity in the subordination.

EJS is also co-sponsoring the post-conference cocktail reception.

For more information and to register for the conference, click here.

EJS Legal Director Allison Elgart and EJS Board Member Tobias Barrington Wolff, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, were among 150 leaders who went to the White House this week to share their experiences and concerns about judicial nominations with administration officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder and the president’s judicial selection team.

Alliance for Justice and its national partners (including EJS) in the ongoing judicial nominations battle played a central role in organizing the White House briefing, which was attended by legal leaders from 27 states.

The event energized the participants, and, we hope, the administration for the fights to come, and lent renewed vigor to an effort to end the destructive pattern of procedural delays that have left nearly one in ten federal judgeships without a judge.

The deep sense of urgency conveyed by the participants was motivated by the fact that the Senate has confirmed far fewer nominees at this point in President Obama’s first term than it had for his two predecessors, and that current vacancies on the federal bench have actually risen by 43 percent since he took office.

Participants relayed the frustration growing in communities around the nation as understaffed courts face enormous backlogs and justice is frequently delayed for individuals and businesses whose lives and livelihoods often hang in the balance.

Read a complete update on the Alliance for Justice blog.

Also participating from California:

• John Page, President-Elect, National Bar Association
• Wendy Chang, Co-Chair, Judiciary Committee, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association
• Kiran Jain, Board Member, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association
• Paul Hirose, Immediate Past President, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association
• Sheila Thomas, Civil Rights Attorney
• Harvey Saferstein, Partner, Mintz Levin
• Benjamin Au, Attorney, Caldwell Leslie

They will join 150 community leaders from 27 states in a day of discussions with White House staff. A deal between Senate Republicans and Democrats to allow judicial nominations to proceed in the Senate expires May 7th, and the community leaders are urging the Senate to hold final up-or-down votes on all pending nominees.

After the White House meeting, the community leaders will visit the offices of key senators, including Senators Boxer and Feinstein, to urge them to work to end the delays that have plagued the Senate confirmation process since the beginning of the Obama presidency.

Despite the delays, the overwhelming majority of Obama’s nominees have garnered tremendous bipartisan support, such as Michael Fitzgerald, who was confirmed to the Central District of California in March by a vote of 91-6.

The California community leaders hope their conversations in Washington will help national leaders understand how harmful the confirmation delays have been to Americans who are seeking justice.

Learn more about the vacancy crisis in America’s federal courts at afj.org.

Asunta Vivó Cavaller

Allison Elgart, EJS Legal Director, attended a special reception on April 24 hosted by the Consul General of Spain in San Francisco in honor of Asunta Vivó Cavaller, the Secretary-General of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty (ICDP) on the occasion of the ICDP’s first mission to the United States.

The ICDP is a multinational commission established through a Spanish initiative to work on abolishing the death penalty around the world.

“It was an honor to be a part of this special gathering and to share EJS’s anti-death penalty work and our involvement in SAFE California,” said Allison. “I spoke briefly with both the Consul General of Spain and with Ms. Cavaller, and I look forward to providing them with more information about our efforts.”

Death Penalty Focus was the host of the International Commission delegation and our friend Elizabeth Zitrin organized a number of special events, including a presentation on International Law Enforcement Views on the Death Penalty on April 24 at Golden Gate University, and a presentation on the Death Penalty and the Latino Communities of California at Loyola Marymount University on April 26.

Original post by Jeanne Woodford, former Warden at San Quentin State Prison, current Executive Director at Death Penalty Focus, and official proponent of the SAFE California Campaign.

It’s official. The SAFE California Act (http://www.safecalifornia.org), the initiative to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no possibility of parole, has qualified for the November ballot. The last of California’s 58 counties have tallied our signatures and we far exceeded the half-million needed to qualify. In fact, members of the SAFE California Campaign collected so many signatures with such a high validity rate that we qualified even earlier than we expected.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this occasion. This is epic. We’re talking game-changing, earth-shattering, Cecil B. DeMille epic.

And Californians are not alone in this moment. In fact, the tide is rapidly turning on the death penalty across the United States. The wave has washed over five states in the last five years, most recently in Connecticut where this week the Governor will sign into law the bill replacing the death penalty.

We’re not alone but what we do really matters. Our state has a storied history with the death penalty. Since 1978 we’ve built up the nation’s largest death penalty system, housing a full 20% of the nation’s entire death row population (more than 720 men and women) in the most expensive incarceration facility the state has to offer. In 2009, just one California county handed down more death sentences than the entire state of Texas. But that history is rapidly changing.

Today, voters have more information than ever. We know, for example, that California’s death penalty is a hollow promise. Despite over 30 years of sentencing more and more people to death, only about 1% of them have actually been executed –  a total of 13 executions since 1978.

We also know more about the costs — we’ve spent a whopping $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978 with no public safety benefit at all in a state where nearly half of all murders remain unsolved and over half of reported rapes cases are never cleared. That’s one of the reasons so many family members of murder victims and law enforcement professionals have joined the SAFE California Campaign to replace the death penalty. They would prefer to use our savings to catch killers and prevent crime rather than fund an empty symbol.

Even two of the principal architects of California’s death penalty have changed their minds. Don Heller, who wrote the death penalty law in 1978, and Ron Briggs, who helped enact it into law, both call it “a colossal failure”. They have joined SAFE California and have pledged to replace it.

The truth is that the SAFE California Act is a game-changer of massive proportions. Voters in California will get to choose for the first time between the death penalty and life with absolutely no chance of parole. And it will be the first time that we have a fully informed vote. SAFE California will do everything possible to explain to voters the staggering fiscal and social costs of the death penalty, as well as the inevitable risk of executing an innocent person.

Everything points to another epic win, this time at the ballot box in November. Recent polls show California voters are ready to replace the death penalty.  Both the Public Policy Institute of California and Field Poll have found that when given the option, more California voters opted for life in prison without the possibility of parole over the death penalty. This November will be the first time ever that California voters are given a choice to weigh in this deeply important issue with real information.

SAFE California is a historic campaign that will change California forever – for the better. Once we replace the death penalty in November, we will save millions in public safety dollars and California will never again risk executing an innocent person. We’ll soon have the opportunity to use  hundreds of millions of dollars in budget savings to improve personal safety for families across our state.

The death penalty first went under in New York and New Jersey in 2007. Then it was New Mexico in 2009, Illinois in 2011, and now Connecticut this year, poised to become the 17th state to replace the death penalty. With SAFE California’s qualification for the ballot, California can be next.