By Jakob Rodgers
Bay Area News Group
ALAMEDA COUNTY, Calif. — A second freed death row inmate this month sued Alameda County for hundreds of millions of dollars, claiming he wrongfully spent most of his life in prison after prosecutors systematically kept Black jurors from sitting on his murder trial.
Ernest Dykes, 52, demanded the county pay $282 million in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal district court, significantly upping the stakes in a jury exclusion scandal that has led to the release of numerous formerly-condemned inmates. Another of those men sued the county earlier this month and sought even more money, bringing Alameda County’s potential ledger for the alleged “systematic discrimination” of Black and Jewish people to $572 million.
The attorney for both men, Brian Pomerantz, said the nine-figure damages sought in each case are meant to send a message that “we need our county officials to act responsibly.”
“We want a jury to tell Alameda County ‘Don’t ever do this again,’ ” Pomerantz said. “Because I have absolutely zero confidence they’ve learned their lesson.”
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the lawsuit.
In 2024, a federal judge’s ruling in Dykes’ case blew open the scandal — detailing “strong evidence” that prosecutors made a conscious effort to keep Black and Jewish people off juries based on their race and religion. Notes discovered in Dykes’ case suggested “prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases,” U.S. District Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in his ruling.
The ruling prompted then-District Attorney Pamela Price to review the cases of every person still condemned to die in the county, nearly three dozen in all. Many of them received new sentences and a chance at parole.
In Dykes’ case, Price’s administration moved to re-examine Dykes’ sentence just months after the federal judge’s ruling. He ultimately pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, attempted murder and second degree robbery, leading to a new 32-year prison term. He was subsequently released in August 2025.
Dykes had been sentenced to die in the 1993 killing of Lance Clark, the grandson of his one-time landlord, during a botched robbery. Dykes first shot the landlord in the neck — after which the bullet hit Lance, who was sitting in his grandmother’s car. The boy died before reaching the hospital, just five days after his ninth birthday, according to court records.
In his lawsuit, Dykes stressed the killing was “unintentional” and that he was “immediately remorseful for his actions,” as evinced in the fact that he turned himself in and “tearfully” confessed.
While seeking the death penalty, a prosecutor on the case — Colton Carmine — managed to keep any Black people from sitting on Dykes’ jury, according to the lawsuit. Only one Black person even made it to a final phase of jury selection, which involved detailed questioning by prosecutors and defense attorneys.
The lawsuit claimed the potential juror’s “middle of the road, non-controversial answers” were very similar to those of her white counterparts, yet Carmine still moved to strike her off the jury ahead of trial. He appeared to justify his decision by accusing the woman of “dodging” specific questions — despite the fact that “nothing in the record suggests that her responses were improper or evasive,” the lawsuit said.
Carmine’s notes also suggested that he worked in other ways to keep all Black and Jewish people off Dykes’ jury, specifically by grading them poorly based on their responses in the jury selection process. At one point, Carmine wrote of a potential Jewish juror that “I liked him better than any other Jew But No Way .”
“This kind of discrimination has no place in the American justice system,” said Dykes’ lawsuit. “In any capacity it would be anathema to the rights enumerated in the Constitution, but its intrusion into a death penalty case is especially troubling.”
Attempts by this news organization to reach Carmine were unsuccessful.
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