Berkeley Law’s Paper Prisons Initiative led by Professor Colleen V. Chien, recently unveiled an innovative database aimed at helping defendants and people convicted of crimes challenge a charge, conviction, or sentence under the California Racial Justice Act (RJA).
The initiative’s Racial Justice Act Tool(opens in a new tab), which is currently in beta mode, reports on data provided by the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) database of arrests, court actions, convictions, and sentences in California. Users can sort by a variety of variables, including the race of a defendant, what they were charged with, the county where it happened, and the year.
Chien outlines the tool’s value in a paper(opens in a new tab) published in the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law(opens in a new tab)(BJCL) earlier this year with Santa Clara Law Professor William A. Sundstrom, web developer Yabo Du, Santa Clara University computer science graduate student Akhil Raj, and Berkeley Law students Bennett Cyphers ’25 and Rayna Saron ’24. All are members of the initiative, a grant-funded research project Chien founded and leads which combines data science and law to address and advance economic and racial justice through research on the second chance gap.
The journal volume collects scholarly work from BJCL’s spring Racial Justice Act Symposium, which gathered expert lawyers, computer scientists, scholars, government officials, criminal justice nonprofit leaders and students to examine the law’s early implementation and implications.
Enacted in 2020, the RJA prohibits bias based on race, ethnicity, or national origin in charges, convictions, and sentences issued in court. It permits a challenge to a criminal conviction if a judge, attorney, law enforcement officer, expert witness, or juror exhibited bias or animus towards the defendant because of their race, ethnicity, or national origin — or used racially discriminatory language during the trial.
To make a case for relief on the basis of a pattern of racial disparity, however, the law requires evidence of this disparity, which is often hard to come by for individual defendants. The tool makes it possible to access data supporting a prima facie case, leveling the playing field and enabling more people to assess and bring their potential claims.
The data can also reveal insights about the law and its potential limitations. For example, it required that the comparisons be for cases where defendants are “similarly situated” and in the “same county” — a bar that can be too high in smaller jurisdictions, Chien and her co-authors write, to tease out valuable information about bias.
For example, they find that for 16 counties with small Black populations, not a single offense has a large enough number of arrest incidents in 2019 for the data to be reportable. Later in the criminal cycle, no comparison of Black defendants involving felony convictions is possible in more than three-quarters of the state’s counties.
The online tool breaks down differences among races for different offenses and various stages of the criminal process and differentiates between California’s 58 counties. Using statewide data can help solve the problem of tiny sample sizes and help the law meet its ultimate aims, they write.
“The California Racial Justice Act holds considerable promise as a tool for identifying and remedying racial disparities in the criminal justice system, but its potential has been constrained by the lack of data needed to detect the presence or absence of an actionable disparity,” they write. “If the RJA is to have its intended impact of ‘eliminating racial bias’ from the criminal justice system, its evidentiary standards cannot be so strict as to make it nearly impossible to demonstrate a disparity except for the most common offenses in the most populous counties and racial groups.”
The project also just introduced two other RJA-related elements: a blog(opens in a new tab) with first-person stories from incarcerated people and their families and friends that’s a partnership with Berkeley Law’s Criminal Law and Justice Center and a diary feature as another avenue for amplifying the voices of those who are using the tool.