After ten months in office, Alameda County’s appointed District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson in June won election to the office. During her appointed term, she did nothing to distance herself or the office from the well-documented history of racist behavior by former Alameda County prosecutors. We have seen this playbook before in Alameda County—prosecutors who are out of step with the voters and eschewed all responsibility for inappropriate, racially biased conduct among their ranks.
The Alameda district attorney's blatant denial of former prosecutor Ted Landswick's racism is just one shocking example of the problem. And an opportunity to set things right.
In 1994, Landswick was one of the highest-ranking prosecutors in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. He was part of the elite unit that aggressively prosecuted death penalty cases. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Alameda County was the leading death penalty county in Northern California. Nearly everyone sentenced to death from Alameda County during this period was a person of color, overwhelmingly Black men.
We now know that Alameda County prosecutors systematically removed Black, Jewish, and LGBTQ people from juries in death penalty cases. Although defense attorneys and even a former prosecutor in the office asserted for decades that this was happening, the DA’s office repeatedly denied it. Then last year, irrefutable proof was found in the office’s files in the form of prosecutors’ notes using slurs and offensive language to refer to prospective jurors. Landswick’s racist behavior, which went beyond illegal and racially biased jury selection, was also fully documented.
A letter in Landswick’s personnel file from then District Attorney John Meehan states, “on Friday, November 4, 1994, at approximately 10:00 a.m. in Department One of the Alameda County Superior Court you publicly repeated three (3) times a racist and degrading term when referring to two African Americans.” The letter specifies that the term was the “N-word,” though it did not use this code. The letter continues, “you twice were questioned about the remark and each time you made it clear that you intended to use the term since you repeated it each time.”
To his credit, Meehan was appalled. His letter states, “I find the use of the term offensive and degrading,” and “[y]our conduct is personally embarrassing and offensive to everyone within the Alameda County District Attorney's Office.” Meehan removed Landswick from felony trials and docked his pay as a sanction.
Thirty years later, under Jones Dickson’s leadership, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office now denies that Landswick held racist views. In response to a defense filing in the case In the Matter of Darren Stanley, the district attorney’s office stated, “Respondent admits that Theodore Landswick was a deputy district attorney but denies that he was the sole prosecuting attorney at petitioner’s trial, denies that he held racist views, and denies that he referred to black men as [“N-word”] during judicial proceedings.”
When the district attorney and senior staff refuse to acknowledge racism in their ranks—even when confronted with repeated uses of a racial slur in public and the very real harm that these views cause—they show us that they are more concerned with protecting one of their own than they are with fairness and justice.
Rather than attempting to rewrite history, Jones Dickson should be leading the way in addressing these wrongs and figuring out how to ensure they never happen again. This would start with agreeing to remove all remaining death sentences tainted by racism and reevaluating the cases of people still in prison who were prosecuted by Ted Landswick.