Recalled Alameda County DA Pamela Price Blasts the Office’s New Direction

Former Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price is calling out the swift reversal of many of her landmark initiatives just over 100 days after her successor, Ursula Jones Dickson, took office.

Since the county’s Board of Supervisors appointed Jones Dickson following Price’s recall in February, she has quietly withdrawn death row resentencing efforts for at least four people who Price’s administration determined had received unfair sentences due to prosecutorial bias. For decades, Price has said, the office under prior district attorneys had covered up its practice of excluding Black and Jewish jurors from death penalty cases.

Jones Dickson has also dropped what Price called historic environmental justice charges and restructured her landmark Public Accountability Unit, which aimed to review police misconduct cases.

“I don’t think the residents of Alameda County understood that they were going to go back to the days when Black people and Jewish people were not allowed to serve on juries — that’s the danger that you have,” Price said during a press conference on Wednesday. “When the police got to tell the district attorney what she or he should or should not do, that’s the danger. We’re going backwards.”

Many of the hallmarks of Price’s administration were also flashpoints in the campaign to recall her, which succeeded in November following community strife over her progressive prosecutorial decisions and her office’s response to crimes, especially in cities like Oakland and Alameda.

Jones Dickson vowed to right the office by retraining staff, rebuilding relationships with community and law enforcement partners and clearing a backlog of misdemeanor cases.

She said on her 100th day in office that her main goals were increasing efficiency and accountability to victims and their families.

“The DA’s position is not a political position,” Jones Dickson said in an apparent dig at Price. “The goal is to be an elected public servant. We stay in our lane, we keep the main thing the main thing.”

CalMatters first reported last week that Jones Dickson has sought to withdraw motions Price filed to resentence four people on death row following a mandated review of 35 death penalty cases in Alameda County last year.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ordered the review based on evidence that prosecutors had systematically struck Black and Jewish jurors from cases dating back to the 1980s. Last year, Price revealed notes written by prosecutors highlighting the race and ethnicity of potential jurors in the case of Ernest Dykes, whose release was reset for this month under Price.

Price said Wednesday that Jones Dickson’s decision to drop the resentencing efforts was an attempt to cover up prosecutorial misconduct. She has alleged that her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley, also ignored evidence of such misconduct to protect the reputation of the district attorney’s office.

“As an officer of the court and someone who has sworn to uphold the Constitution, Judge Jones Dickson has an absolute duty to ensure that justice is done for those men,” Price said. “We all have a right to the rule of law and not have it compromised by corruption or nepotism.”

The Public Accountability Unit, which Price created to review police misconduct cases and called a “reckoning” for Alameda County, has also been restructured under Jones Dickson.

The department has been renamed the Public Integrity Division, and its procedures will more closely resemble O’Malley’s prosecutorial practices, spokesperson Haaziq Madyun told the Mercury News in March.

Notably, Price attempted to relitigate a case against three Alameda police officers in the death of 26-year-old Mario Gonzalez, an unarmed man who died after being pinned down by police.

She filed charges just days after the recall campaign against her qualified for last November’s ballot, and her office took heat after the cases against two of the three officers were dismissed for missing the three-year statute of limitations to file charges.

Price has also criticized the district attorney’s office for dropping an environmental justice case she brought against Radius Recycling, formerly Schnitzer Steel, over a 2023 fire that prosecutors said spread toxic smoke throughout the East Bay.

Price’s office had charged the company and two leaders of its West Oakland scrap metal processing plant with recklessly managing hazardous materials, including aged vehicles and appliances, and later trying to cover it up.

Jones Dickson said her office dropped the case after finding that it did not meet high evidentiary standards.

“The bottom line is we can not move forward ethically on a case that we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said.

She said the case was reviewed along with others in the consumer division, some of which had been delegated out to a contracted law firm.

“I had not seen that before — a law firm being hired by a district attorney to do the work of DAs,” Jones Dickson said, adding that it was a concern to the department.

Jones Dickson said she could not comment on whether the office would bring a civil case against Radius Recycling.

In response to questions about her motivation for speaking out against Jones Dickson, Price confirmed she isn’t planning to mount another campaign for office or a recall effort against her successor.

“The reason that I feel it’s important [is] that the public should understand what is truly happening,” she told reporters. “It became clear in the last few days, and certainly with the 100-day report, that there are some things that the public needs to know about.

“It’s not a new direction. [Jones Dickson] has dismantled everything we’ve done and has basically taken everything back to what Miss O’Malley had,” she said.