Tuesday’s regular meeting agenda for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors [ALCO BOS] was published late Friday, offering the first glimmer of a potential timeline for a Recall election of ALCO District Attorney Pamela Price. So far, the document is bad news for SAFE, the DA Recall Campaign that demanded last week that the BOS follow either the current charter rules—or quickly implement new state rules—in such a way that a recall special election would be held this summer. The loosely based group of finance and real estate investors and local political personalities held a small rally of a dozen people in front of the County administration building last week, demanding that both the certification and a special election scheduling legislative item be placed on the 4/30 agenda, the dual necessary prerequisites for a summer recall. But the 4/30 meeting agenda lists only the legislative item for certification of the recall signatures from the Registrar of Voters [ROV], which is just the predicate to schedule a recall election—and notably has no item that would schedule a special election.
The BOS’s lack of a special election scheduling item on Tuesday’s agenda begins to close the door on SAFE’s strategy to get the recall on an off-general election—special elections often have fewer voters, and a larger proportion of more conservative, older ones.
While it's unclear whether the Secretary of State has certified the charter change that will replace ALCO’s century-old recall process with the state’s rules yet, ROV Tim Dupuis is advising the BOS to follow the State’s recall timeline, regardless. In a memo to the BOS, Dupuis lays out the state’s rules on Recalls, noting that the 14 day window to call for an election begins with the certification of the signatures.
Assuming the BOS certifies the count on Tuesday, the last day in the 14 day window falls on a scheduled regular meeting. After May 7, any scheduling of an election will fall in the 180 day window that would allow the recall to be placed on the November ballot according to state rules. And the BOS could forgo involving itself in the election scheduling altogether—after the 14 day window, the state allows Dupuis to schedule the election if the BOS doesn’t, with no inherent penalty.
In his memo, Dupuis cautions the BOS from deviating from the state timeline, noting that holding a special election would cost from $15 to 20 MM in currently unbudgeted funds. Dupuis, who has faced several questions about his competence over the past several years, has been forced by the inadequate charter rules to follow an irregular path on the recall. After failing to finish the count with certainty by the time the charter-mandated ten day period concluded on March 14, Dupuis expanded the count to 30 days, following state rules. Dupuis also took other questionable actions, like waiving the Charter’s requirement that all signature gatherers be Alameda County residents and registered voters. A legal challenge by the Price campaign or an independent resident based on those actions by the ROV could still alter the recall timeline or challenge the recall itself.
DA Price Directed to Investigate all Death Penalty Cases by Judge
ALCO District Attorney Pamela Price issued a press release last week revealing that her office has been instructed by a Federal judge to investigate all death penalty cases of the ALCO DA after the discovery of potential racist jury selection practices in previous DA administrations. The judge, Vince Chhabria is presiding over the resentencing case of Ernest Dykes, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1995 under the DA administration of John Mehan and then Tom Orloff, who was elected to the DA seat in 1994 after Mehan retired.
But in the process of deliberating the resentencing, Price’s office found alarming notes from the DA’s office reflecting an apparently open practice of excluding potential jurors based on their ethnicity. Price turned the notes over to the Dykes’ defense attorneys and Judge Chhabria—notes provided to this publication show prosecutor’s critiquing the race of potential jurors, along with what appears to be associated assumptions about their political beliefs. Price’s office said that 35 such cases had been identified with cases going back to the nineties.
During the Dykes case, Orloff was the Deputy District Attorney under Meehan and succeeded Meehan, who died in 2020. Orloff was a supporter of the death penalty and the DA’s office under his leadership pursued it in notable cases—Orloff himself chose to prosecute a high-profile case in which he sought and won the death penalty in 2005 against a San Leandro resident charged with murdering a police officer—ironically, the officer's wife went on to become a proponent of Proposition 47 . Former DA Nancy O’Malley was a mentee of Orloff and was recommended for appointment to the DA role when Orloff retired in mid-term. Orloff recently contributed $5k to the recall effort against Pamela Price.
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