RAGE: Judge halts trial for evaluation

From Page A1 begin July 3. Wilson, 54, of Elk Grove, faces two counts of attempted murder and multiple weapon-related charges in connection with the alleged road-rage shootings that occurred Feb. 10, 2022, on the Mace Boulevard overpass. amendment will significantly weaken California’s constitutional principle of equal treatment for all,” wrote Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, in a letter to lawmakers. She told CalMatters she expects state Democrats to prevail in placing the measure on the ballot, but her group will fight it — and has the experience. Wu and other foundation officials played key roles in successfully campaigning against Proposition 16.

According to court testimony, Wilson called his girlfriend while driving that morning, telling her he feared an assassination attempt on his life. From there he exited the freeway at Mace Boulevard, then opened fire with an assault rifle at two vehicles whose drivers told police they'd had no prior contact with Wilson. Both escaped injury.

Afterward, Wilson drove off the roadway and fled from his truck, hiding from authorities for about two hours before his apprehension along Second Street.

The foundation she leads recently sued various city and state agencies for using race and sex as a factor in eligibility for public social programs.

The effect

Unlike Proposition 16, this latest constitutional amendment effort to change Proposition 209 wouldn’t permit the state’s public universities to use race as a factor in admissions, Jackson said.

Wu doesn’t believe him.

His measure would “bring back racial preferences, as long as racial preferences can be used to improve outcomes,” she said.

That’s basically undoing Proposition 209 without saying so, her group argues.

For now, the state’s private universities can consider race in admissions, but federal education watchers expect that to change as soon as tomorrow. Most predict that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down affirmative action nationally sometime in June, undoing a court precedent first established in 1978 in a case that concerned the University of California — auguring the system’s central role in setting the national debate around racial preferences.

Should the measure reach voters, convincing them to amend Proposition 209 will be a tall order.

California’s liberal voting block wasn’t persuaded that the state needed to use race as a factor to solve its biggest problems. Even in progressive Los Angeles County, while a majority of every major racial and ethnic group backed Joe Biden, a Democrat, for president in 2020, most county Asian and white voters voted no on Proposition 16, according to The New York Times.

Gary Orfield, a professor at UCLA who focuses on civil rights in law and education, said Jackson’s measure could create a new legal terrain for the state’s many cultural groups to push for changes in state programs.

“Who knows how the state Supreme Court would interpret language like this or what kinds of issues would be invented that would require interpretation,” Orfield said, who added he’d probably vote for the measure if it appeared on the ballot.

However, it’s hard to predict what those issues or interpretations would look like because the measure’s language and scope are so broad.

So broad, in fact, that like Wu, he thinks the language could permit California public colleges to use race as a factor in admissions — though, again, that permission would be overruled if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action as expected.

Of course, a future court could overturn a ban on affirmative action — the U.S. Supreme Court has a long history of overruling precedent. So in an era in which affirmative action were legal nationally, Jackson’s measure is, in Orfield’s view, “ambiguous” enough that a state agency could point to studies showing that race-based affirmative action does lead to educational gains for students of color.

Will it work?

Jackson’s proposal isn’t likely to reach that goal of overcoming past racial and ethnic injustices, said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a decades-old organization that NBC News in 2016 described as “the law firm of the Latino community.”

Saenz told CalMatters that he doesn’t see how the amendment could make a difference in California.

Saenz said that under current federal law and court precedent “something that specifically excludes everyone else based on race probably can’t meet the ‘narrow tailoring’ requirements” in place that tell government agencies to use race as minimally as possible.

Instead, state lawmakers would have to include far more specific race-neutral eligibility criteria to target underrepresented identity groups, which is time-consuming, difficult and, in his view, insufficient.

“If you want to eliminate racial discrimination, you have to use race, and that’s what’s been prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Saenz said, except in college admissions, which likely won’t be the case by the end of June.