Freed death row prisoner seeks $290 million from Alameda County over jury exclusion scandal

A former death row prisoner freed after judges found Alameda County prosecutors unconstitutionally excluded Black jurors from his murder trial is now seeking $290 million from the county in a lawsuit.

Curtis Lee Ervin, 73, claims Alameda County fostered the “widespread” and “deeply rooted unwritten policy” since the early 1980s when seating juries in capital cases, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week. Ervin — who spent more than three decades on death row before his conviction was vacated and he was released — now ranks among a growing list of people either made eligible for parole or released from prison in the wake of the scandal, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit marks the latest turn in a scandal that blew open in spring 2024, when U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria found “strong evidence” that prosecutors had been “engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases.” The ruling prompted then-district attorney Pamela Price’s office to review the convictions of nearly three dozen people still awaiting execution, many of whom received new sentences and a chance at parole.

In Ervin’s case, a prosecutor refused to seat nine prospective Black jurors at his death penalty trial — leaving his case to be decided by 11 white people and one Black man. In recent years, multiple judges decried those tactics, leading Ervin to be released from custody in August 2025 after almost 39 years behind bars. The vast majority of that time was spent on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Ervin’s attorney said the nine-figure amount sought in the lawsuit comes down to a simple issue: “You tell me what years and years of your life on death row are worth.”

“I would like to see Alameda County learn from this, so that this never happens again,” said the attorney, Brian Pomerantz. “The Alameda DA’s office is not trying to figure out how to appropriately rectify bad cases, unconstitutional verdicts. What they’re trying to do is keep people in prison as long as they can.”

The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office told this news outlet that it does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit accuses the county of allowing prosecutors to “rig the juries,” in a practice that continued for decades within the district attorney’s office. It alleged the county “failed to adequately train, oversee, correct supervisors and/or discipline” its prosecutors, who allegedly viewed constitutional obligations as “arbitrary.”

“What happened there was very intentional,” Pomerantz said. “And it was conniving. They looked at other places where people got caught, and they designed a custom and a practice of doing this in a way where they wouldn’t be caught.”

At the time Chhabria made his finding in 2024, Ervin had been awaiting execution in the November 1986 killing of Carlene McDonald, who was slain in an alleged murder-for-hire plot believed by prosecutors to be masterminded by the woman’s ex-husband. That man, Robert McDonald, was accused by prosecutors of hiring Ervin and another person to carry out the killing for $2,500.

Ervin long maintained his innocence, and suggested in court filings after his conviction that the actual killer was a star witness for the prosecution, a claim he repeats in the new lawsuit.

His lawsuit, filed May 27, alleges his June 1991 death sentence was flawed from the start after nine Black people were kept from serving on the jury.

The prosecutor overseeing the case, James Anderson, allegedly justified his moves by complaining about the young age or work obligations of the Black jurors he successfully dismissed, despite the fact that white people left on the jury were younger or had similar responsibilities complicating their service, the lawsuit claimed. Anderson also “used religion as a pretext to justify his race-based” decisions, the lawsuit added.

The moves by Anderson — who oversaw all capital prosecutions from 1991 through his retirement in 2004 — allegedly came as multiple people within the district attorney’s office worked under the assumption that Jewish and Black people would be less willing to deliver verdicts favorable to prosecutors, the lawsuit argues. It further claims “Anderson has stated that eliminating Jewish and Black jurors was ‘not a racist thing, but just common sense.’ ”

At least four other convictions secured by the prosecutor have either been overturned or had their sentences reduced in recent years, the lawsuit says. That includes the 2001 death sentence for Miguel Augustine Lopez, who was condemned after Anderson successfully managed to keep every person of color from sitting on his jury. It also includes the vacated conviction for Frank Lynch, who was sentenced to die in 1992 after Anderson managed to keep three Black women from being seated at his trial.

Judge Chhabria vacated Ervin’s conviction in August 2024. Ervin then pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter, as well as robbery and kidnapping charges, and received a new, 27-year sentence. That figure was then halved for good behavior in prison.

The plea was meant “to ensure his freedom after decades of incarceration,” the lawsuit claims, and he was released a year later. That moment ended “four decades of never-ending severe psychological trauma,” during which he endured the presence of vermin and spoiled food while on death row, as well as the “unremitting, cacophonous noise” of other condemned prisoners with mental illnesses housed near him.

“For fourteen years, every time a neighbor was led away to the execution chamber, plaintiff was forced to confront his own state-sanctioned execution,” the lawsuit says.

Nearly 20 years have passed since anyone was executed in California, which holds more condemned prisoners than any other state in the nation. Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a moratorium on executions across the state in 2019, and he began dismantling the state’s death row three years later.

The lawsuit alleges a line of district attorneys from 1980 through 2012 fostered the culture that allowed such a practice to take root, often by not disciplining prosecutors who allegedly excluded certain jurors in violation of the Constitution. The practice was taught and shared openly by prosecutors in the office, the lawsuit claimed, citing one example of a deputy district attorney advocating for Jewish people to be left off juries during a 1992 conference in San Diego.

The district attorney’s office “was a brotherhood where prosecutors were never supposed to ‘break rank’ and complain about a lack of ethics or clear violations of case law,” the lawsuit argues. The agency, it adds, “avoided accountability by not putting unethical instructions in writing.”

Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at [email protected].