When Laila Aziz moved back to San Diego, the names on everyone’s lips were Brian Mason and Thabiti Wilson, the younger brothers of people she grew up with.
They were both convicted of robbery murder, known in California as penal code 190.2a(17)(A): “felony murder special circumstances.”
Mason wasn’t accused of being the actual killer, but of being an accomplice in the robbery. He still received life without parole — a sentence to die in prison.
“I didn’t understand the law. How do you get a death sentence if you didn’t kill anyone?” Aziz said.
Aziz became a community organizer in 2001. She now directs Pillars of the Community, a nonprofit that advocates for people impacted by San Diego’s justice system.
She keeps an eye on California laws, and they recently changed.
People can now appeal for resentencing if they weren’t the actual killer in a special circumstances case, or if they can prove racial bias in their case.
Aziz went to work.
‘Strange fruit’
Black San Diegans have long voiced racial bias in the local justice system. But to prove their lived experience under California law, cases have to be “similarly situated.” Apples to apples.
Aziz needed to compare cases as similar to Brian Mason’s and Thabiti Wilson’s as possible.
So she filed a public records request for all robbery murder cases with defendants between 18 and 25 years old at the time of the crime. She chose that range because before 25, the decision-making part of the brain — the prefrontal cortex — hasn’t fully developed. She requested only cases sentenced under Paul Pfingst — San Diego’s District Attorney from 1995 to 2003.
Some codefendants and cases she could find in the news archives weren’t part of the case list she received. She found many white defendants who could have been charged with felony murder special circumstances never were, or were given plea deals for lesser charges.
“And that's when we realized, you're not going to get the data just from the DA. That's where we got the original (public records) from. We're going to have to dig. We're going to have to scrape. And that's where we got to work,” she said.
Pillars of the Community analyzed mass amounts of data. Filed more records requests. Visited courts. Combed through archives.
KPBS did the same, locating and reading not only the felony murder cases and ensuing appeals, but all prior convictions for each defendant.
A clear pattern emerged.
Thirteen out of 15 white defendants in robbery murder cases — killers and nonkillers — were given the chance at parole.
In one of the cases, a white man was convicted of brutally murdering a Latino man. One witness for the prosecution testified he bragged about finally earning his “bolts” — a symbol often chosen for tattoos by white supremacists. He had his first parole hearing in 2023.
Eleven out of 12 Black defendants — killers and nonkillers — were given life without parole.
“When you're looking at people — not even numbers anymore, I know all of their names by heart — when you’re looking at people and you see them treated differently by the same exact system, you're like, ‘Separate but equal. Plessy versus Ferguson, Jim Crow. It all feels the same,’” Aziz said.
The data show it wasn’t one problem judge, one over-eager attorney, or even prior convictions.
It was a racial pattern.
Aziz traces a line from life without parole sentences to lynching trees.
“We called it strange fruit because it reminded us of where we were 50, 60 years ago and where we said as a country we were not going to go back to,” she said.
Pillars decided to hold what they call a “People’s Tribunal.”
Putting the District Attorney on trial
Aziz said trying to approach the District Attorney’s office directly over this issue was not working. The community decided to take power into their own hands.
“To charge this district attorney the way they charge us, to subpoena the district attorney the way they subpoena us, and even write a declaration affidavit saying that we attest that all of these things are true,” she said.
They put the current San Diego County District Attorney, Summer Stephan, on mock trial.
On a Thursday night in late January, people who had been impacted by the justice system filled a room near the Chollas Parkway and spilled out into the hallway. Enlarged mugshots bordered the room.
“Every single person has the same exact crime,” Aziz said. “Look around the room.”
She pointed to a Black man’s mugshot.
“That's a nonkiller. Death or parole?” she asked the crowd.
“Death,” they murmured.
“Death,” she confirmed.
Then, she pointed to a white man’s mugshot.
“Guy next to him, nonkiller. Death or parole?,” she asked.
“Parole,” the room answered.
“Do you know these people?” The room shook their heads.
“Oh, ain't that something? Why can you tell? Is that okay that you can tell?” she said.
A lone representative from the DA addressed the room, Frank Jackson.
“How did this happen? The answer to your question is, I don't know that answer, so I'm not going to make it up. That happened in, I think most of these look like the 1998s and 2000s,” he said.
KPBS asked the District Attorney's office for an interview with Stephan on three separate occasions and they declined. They would not respond to any of the claims in this story or answer any of KPBS’s related questions. Spokesperson Tanya Sierra responded with the following statement.
“The cases summarized in the document you provided were all adjudicated more than 21 years ago under a District Attorney who left office in 2003, and it would be inappropriate for us to comment on them specifically. Our office’s current policy requires prosecutors to file special circumstances allegations in all cases where the facts meet the legal definition of the crime, as we do for all charging decisions. Our office’s mission is focused on pursuing fair and equal justice for all. We take our duty very seriously to treat every case and each defendant the same based on the evidence and the law. To suggest otherwise is reckless and ignores our office’s commitment and track record over the years of seeking fair and equal justice and putting various criminal justice reforms in place.”
Aziz isn’t accepting that response, because Stephan’s office has the power now to resentence the felony murder cases under Paul Pfingst from life without parole to life with parole.
“But she has chosen not to do it. So you can't fight to uphold Paul Pfingst’s legacy of foundational racism and then say it was before your time,” she said.
Pfingst did not respond to KPBS’s three emails, a voicemail, and a message left with an assistant, sent over a month and a half.
Jackson said when California district attorneys gained the power to resentence old cases, their office was the first in the state to request it.
Aziz said individual cases are not enough.
“A lot of people don't have access like that. A lot of people don't have the ability to write something that would capture the DA's attention,” she said. “Young white men don't need that when they come in the system. They don't need you to cherry-pick them. So change the system so that it works for all.”
At the People’s Tribunal, they called witnesses.
Including Linda Whitley. Her son’s mugshot was in the room.
She asked Aziz to hold up what she sees as proof he’s changed: College degrees he earned in prison; books he wrote.
“I just want my baby to come home,” she said.
One family behind the number
Going through the court process with her son was hard for Whitley.
“It was terrible because I didn’t understand a lot of the stuff they was saying,” she said.
Whitley was never taught to read.
Without that ability, she can’t drive. She’s scared to fly. She doesn’t take the bus beyond a few familiar stops. Her son is incarcerated in Los Angeles, and she can’t visit him often. The reality of living separated from her only son still brings ready tears after 25 years.
She doesn’t fully understand the word “parole.”
She knows some people get to come home. And her son, Marquell Smith, can’t.
“I know he can show the world now. He could be a better person now,” she said.
She video visits with her son over the prison’s communications app.
In March, KPBS did the same.
“Even though I have a life without the possibility, plus 206 years sentence, I know that the good Lord has a plan for me in the near future,” Smith said.
Smith didn’t always talk this way.
“For years, I was just bumping my head in and out of the hole, catching SHUs, doing ignorant things, being involved with violence, and just the prison nonsense. And the way prison was back then, there was no ... You wouldn't hear about nobody going home. If you had life, you had life. You know what I mean? And so that was the social structure. That was the culture. It's all about survival and doing what you do to maintain your status. You're doing things out of fear because you don't want people to feel that you're less than. You want to be known as being hard. But at the same time, that comes from your adverse childhood experiences. All of that, the fear that you obtain when you were young, still resides within you,” he said.
Adverse childhood experiences are among many challenges Smith has lived, but for which he only recently learned language.
Education and faith changed his thinking, he said.
A priest used to visit him in solitary confinement.
He started attending the prison’s church services. And college classes.
He said he began “coming up with ideas about how could I make a difference in the world instead of being a product of destruction. And so now I want to be an engine of putting a stop to the self-destruction that goes on in the same type of communities in which I come from.”
He wrote two books, including one intended to steer youth away from crime.
He quit cursing and smoking weed. He mentors other incarcerated people.
He said he hasn’t been written up for bad behavior since 2016.
“I want others to understand that there's a better way, and love is the key,” he said.
Despite these changes, Smith can’t go before the parole board to let them decide if he deserves a chance to come home. His sentence doesn’t let him.
He was convicted of killing a 19-year-old clerk during a convenience store robbery.
KPBS reached out to the clerk’s parents but did not receive a response.
Smith admits guilt to other things he’s been accused of, but denies that charge.
His codefendant Lazair Carter was not convicted as the actual killer, but is also serving life without parole.
Whether Marquell Smith is innocent or guilty doesn’t change the racial differences in the sentencing of cases like his.
Smith thinks there was racial bias in his trial, too.
“The judge was calling me and my co-defendant ‘dudes,’ and when the detective was allowed to talk about ghetto gang hits in my case, and my case is not even a gang case. You know what I'm saying? Why are you talking about the ghetto? You know what I'm saying? In front of a jury. That had to be racist. You know what I mean? I knew that long ago, but I didn't know how to incorporate it into my arguments, and finding the case law that was against it,” he said.
He has an appeal hearing in May.
If that’s denied, he might appeal again under California’s Racial Justice Act, or RJA.
It would allow for resentencing if he could prove racial bias in his case.
A ‘striking pattern’
When the RJA was passed in 2020, Colleen Chien got to work.
She co-directs the UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
She wanted to provide evidence for the unequal treatment Black people have voiced for decades.
“Lived experience has been there the whole time, but the ability to tell a more broad story based on data has been missing,” she said.
She built a database to compare sentencing outcomes by race in the California justice system.
She found a pattern she calls striking.
“What you might hear is in general, we see that Black people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. But when you actually go at the granular level and look specifically at, well, are they arrested more? Are they convicted more? At every county in every single charge, we saw that there was disparity,” she said. “It's really hard to explain that as existing without the presence of bias.”
Chien says bias doesn’t necessarily mean the judge or attorney or arresting officers are explicitly racist, but that unconscious attitudes add up at every step of the judicial process.
Marquell Smith wants to earn a law degree and parole, and change that.
A new bill introduced this month could give him the opportunity: California Senate Bill 672.
New hope
Senate Bill 672 would allow all people convicted for crimes committed between the ages of 18 and 25 to go before the parole board after 25 years served.
If Smith were granted parole, he said the first thing he would do is spend time with his mother.
“I was locked up, like I said, at 17. I got out at 21, came back at 22, and here it is, I'll be 50 this year. So I haven't had a chance to spend no time with my mother,” he said.
He wants the opportunity to show his growth to the board, and let them decide whether he should return to her.
“People do change. You know what I'm saying? If people see that people can change, that should mean something ... How is our response in life when people change? Let's have compassion. Let's have love. Let's just not give up on our people.”
The California legislature has six months to pass Senate Bill 672.
