Bemore

INTRODUCTION

Twenty-six years after Terry D. Bemore was sentenced to death for the 1985 torture- and robbery-murder of a store clerk, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted his petition for writ of habeas corpus and ordered the death judgment reversed. The court concluded Bemore had not received effective assistance of counsel because his trial counsel’s performance was “professionally unacceptable,” going so far as to find that lead counsel “essentially abdicated his role as a lawyer.” (Bemore v. Chappell (2015) 788 F.3d 1151, 1163, 1165.) Although not an independent basis for the Ninth Circuit’s reversal of the death judgment in 2015, Bemore, who is Black, produced evidence that his lead counsel engaged in racist conduct that affected his ability to adequately defend Bemore at trial. As a result of the extensive work by Bemore’s habeas counsel—including a collective 18 years of service from Pamela Sayasane and Cheryl Cotterill—Bemore was resentenced to life without parole in 2016. Four years later, in 2020, the California Legislature enacted the Racial Justice Act (RJA) (Stats. 2020, ch. 317, § 1), providing statutory authority for defendants to bring a petition for writ of…