Long before I joined the ACLU, I was just a skinny brown kid who grew up in the “Inland Empire” — a region of Southern California that includes 52 cities spread across Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Even when I’ve moved away at different points of my life, the Inland Empire has always been a place that I’ve called home.

However, my younger self could never have imagined that the same field I played club soccer on at Riverside Poly High School was used for a Ku Klux Klan recruitment and cross-burning event less than a century earlier. I was unaware that I attended my high school homecoming a few streets down from where “The Birth of a Nation” — a horribly racist film that glorified the lynchings of Black Americans — once hosted its world debut at the Loring Opera House. Even as of a few months ago, I didn’t know that Riverside’s Hall of Justice sits fewer than two miles from where Lowell Elementary School — which primarily educated Black and Latinx students — was firebombed and destroyed during desegregation protests in 1965.

These are facts I learned about my home as a legal fellow with the ACLU. I am part of a team of attorneys who are bringing the first challenge to death penalty prosecutions under the landmark law known as the California Racial Justice Act (CRJA). We represent two Black men, Russell Austin and Michael Mosby, each of whom face the death penalty in Riverside County — one of the most prolific death-sentencing counties in the nation. Today, a Riverside Superior Court judge will determine whether our two clients will receive an evidentiary hearing under the CRJA. At an evidentiary hearing, we will introduce evidence to prove that our clients received unequal treatment compared to white people with similar cases and will argue that they should therefore be deemed ineligible for the death penalty.

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The CRJA has an ambitious goal: rooting out racism from the criminal legal system. This law allows defendants to challenge more surreptitious forms of implicit and institutional racism in their cases.

It’s important to underline just how significant the CRJA is. The Supreme Court decision in McCleskey v. Kemp closed off constitutional challenges that rely on showing the racist application of the death penalty. Instead, the court required a condemned person to prove that “the decisionmakers in his case acted with discriminatory purpose.” Otherwise, the court infamously said, a theory like Mr. McCleskey’s could open the entire criminal legal system to constitutional challenge for its racist operation. In his dissent, Justice William Brennan said such a concern exhibited a “fear of too much justice.” The CRJA takes direct aim at the court’s decision in McCleskey by allowing people to challenge racism in all forms — explicit, implicit, and structural — in the administration of the criminal legal system, without requiring them to take on the added burden of showing intent in their own cases.

Enabled by the CRJA, Mr. Austin and Mr. Mosby have introduced four statistical analyses from three scholars that reach the same conclusion: Riverside’s death penalty system more severely punishes Black people than any other racial group.

At each step of prosecutorial decision-making in Riverside County, Black defendants are on average treated more harshly than any other racial or ethnic group. In fact, one analysis found that Black defendants in Riverside are approximately nine times more likely to have the prosecution seek death and 14 times more likely to have death sentences imposed against them than white defendants whose cases are similar. Just as significant is the way that Riverside prosecutors have avoided seeking death sentences in homicide cases with Black victims. Cases with Black victims are 61 percent less likely to result in a death sentence than cases with white victims.

While these statistics are in themselves striking, they tell only a partial story of Riverside’s death penalty system. When the California legislature developed the CRJA, it acknowledged that in order to develop a truly fair and equitable criminal legal system, we have to be willing to understand how and why systems functioned unfairly and inequitably in the first place. In short, the CRJA stands for the notion that our criminal legal system’s past is inseparable from our criminal legal system’s present.

To help the court better understand the development and operation of Riverside’s unjust and racist capital punishment system, Mr. Austin and Mr. Mosby also introduced historical evidence that demonstrates a clear, cross-generational record of state-sponsored maltreatment and vigilante violence exacted against Black people in Riverside County.

Historical accounts show that proud members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and KKK-endorsed candidates once dominated Riverside’s local law enforcement and government offices. In positions of immense local influence, local government officials reinforced institutional segregation and designed an intricate system of oppression that harmed non-white Riverside residents throughout the 20th century. Even once legally sanctioned segregation was in the rearview, segregation continued, and more covert forms of racial and discrimination persisted in Riverside.

From the mid- to late-20th centuries, law enforcement raids brought terror into Black neighborhoods in Riverside. Even over the last few decades, Riverside law enforcement officials have faced several national controversies for killing and assaulting Black and Latinx people. The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office has time and again demonstrated an unwillingness to protect the lives of people of color by failing to seek criminal prosecutions of county officers for shooting unarmed victims.

Today, the Inland Empire’s law enforcement and criminal legal systems — which remain sources of immense distrust for many Black residents — disproportionately impose the death penalty against Black people. California’s death row population — the largest in the country — includes 127 people sentenced to death in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Nearly three quarters of those were people of color, including 43 Black people (roughly 34 percent).

We can’t tell an honest story about the Inland Empire — and we can’t understand how our criminal legal system operates — unless we include the violence and discrimination suffered by Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous people here.

If the far-reaching potential impact of the CRJA is to be realized, our courts must acknowledge that no form of racism, overt or covert, is legally acceptable. People in the Inland Empire — Mr. Austin and Mr. Mosby included — deserve an accessible legal system that takes responsibility for our society’s past failures and advances the creative solutions of the CRJA to build a more just, equitable future. Our legal system and its actors cannot be afraid of too much justice.

Last year was a devastating one for our right and ability to make personal decisions about our own bodies and medical care. We saw the end of the protections from Roe v. Wade, abortion banned in more than a dozen states, and four states restrict access to gender-affirming care for youth. This year we’re sure to see more attacks that find even more extreme ways to control our bodies. And we know that these attacks won’t stop with abortion and gender-affirming care; the same politicians seeking to control the bodies of pregnant people are coming for our right to access birth control, to marry whom we love, and even to vote.

The election in November was a victory for reproductive freedom: In every state where abortion was on the ballot, voters showed up to send the message that they want legal, accessible abortion in their state. Voters all over this country clearly believe that politicians shouldn’t be in control of our lives and our bodies — we should. They also believe that it’s time for our laws and policies to reflect our values. But anti-abortion politicians across the country haven’t gotten the message. Politicians are threatening to pass more bans in states that still have abortion access, even if it’s already heavily restricted.

In Nebraska, the same lawmaker who sponsored a failed abortion ban last year has announced she will introduce an abortion ban again this session that would push care out of reach at around six weeks of pregnancy, before many even know they’re pregnant. Politicians in Florida and North Carolina already started to try and pass even more extreme bans in their states this year. And even in South Carolina, where a ban failed to pass this summer, anti-abortion politicians immediately introduced a full abortion ban at the start of this legislative session. These politicians don’t seem to care that forcing someone to carry a pregnancy against their will has life-altering consequences, including enduring serious health risks from continued pregnancy and childbirth, making it harder to escape poverty, more difficult to leave an abusive partner, and derailing education, career, and life plans.

The same lawmakers that don’t want people to be able to make decisions about their pregnancies also don’t want transgender people to be able to make decisions about their medical care. Even before the start of state legislative sessions we’ve seen over 25 pre-filed bills that would strip away young transgender people’s ability to access necessary and life-saving health care, including several that make it a crime for parents or medical professionals to support their children in accessing the care they need. Being a kid is hard enough. We don’t need politicians making it even harder for kids who are transgender and singling them out for increased bullying and harassment.

The fight for abortion access and access to gender affirming care are linked by a simple belief — you are the rightful author of your own life story. Both abortion and gender-affirming care give us the freedom to determine our own paths in life and to defy barriers that oppress and erase women and LGBTQ people. The politicians who want to strip us of that freedom want to write your story for you, deciding who you are, what you do with your body, and if or when you start a family. These efforts are designed to target people who are already marginalized in our country, particularly young people, those trying to make ends meet, and people of color.

These questions are deeply personal, and everyone must be able to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives without government interference.

Here at the ACLU, we will never stop fighting for the freedom of all people to fully control our bodies, lives, and futures. With teams in all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico, we are mobilizing a whole-of-organization response to these extreme attacks on essential health care in state legislatures across the country. From working with partners and key legislators to defeat or minimize attacks on our rights to mobilizing supporters in the streets and statehouses, the ACLU is working to ensure that everyone has access to the essential care they need. And if politicians ignore the clear will of the people, we’ll see them in court.

We won’t rest until that vision is a reality, but we need the full force of our dedicated community to speak out with us: Please sign up today to be part of this crucial work in 2023, and we will send you updates and ways to take action as this year’s legislative sessions continue to unfold.

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