USA - Anthony Bankston (CA)

USA - California. Supreme Court reverses death sentence of Anthony Bankston

June 1, 2026:

June 1, 2026 - California. California Supreme Court reverses death sentence of Anthony George Bankston

In a 1991 case

The court agreed with the California attorney general that the prosecution used racially biased language during closing arguments, comparing the defendant to a Bengal tiger.

A man convicted and sentenced to death for multiple decades-old gang-involved shootings in Los Angeles had his sentence reversed by the California Supreme Court Monday, June 1, finding that the prosecution violated state law by using racially biased language during the trial.

A jury convicted Anthony George Bankston of the first-degree murder of Benson Jones, the attempted premeditated murder of Benjamin Jones and possession of a firearm by a felon. Witnesses testified that Bankston identified himself as a member of the Nine Deuce Bishops, a Blood gang, while Benson and Benjamin Jones were members of the rival Crips.

After jurors deadlocked on additional charges, prosecutors retried the case and secured convictions for the first-degree murder of Jesus Sanchez, who was shot in territory controlled by the Compton Chicano Gang, a rival of a gang allied with the Bloods, and for assault with a firearm against Linda Jones, the sister of Benson and Benjamin.

During sentencing, prosecutors described Bankston, who is Black, as a “killing machine” and a “thug,” closing with a story comparing him to a Bengal tiger and warning jurors not to be swayed by his buttoned-up appearance at trial. He was sentenced to death on Jan. 20, 1995.

Over a decade later, in an automatic appeal to the state supreme court, Bankston argued that his death penalty sentence should be reversed under the California Racial Justice Act, which prohibits the use of racially discriminatory language during trial, including certain language that “compares the defendant to an animal.”

The law, enacted in 2020, specifically cites the Bengal tiger story as an example of the “use of racially incendiary or racially coded language, images and racial stereotypes in criminal trials.”

“In light of the passage of the RJA, we now make clear that, whatever the intent behind telling the story may be, the Bengal tiger story should no longer be told in California courtrooms,” Associate Justice Leondra R. Kruger wrote for the court.

“And as the legislative findings indicate, the oft-told Bengal tiger story is one that carries with it a recognized risk of crossing that line. There is no reason to permit prosecutors to continue running the risk of appealing to biases that undermine the very foundation of a system of equal justice, simply to make an unremarkable point about a defendant’s behavior outside a controlled courtroom setting,” she continued.

The court found that the RJA does not prohibit all animal comparisons, including phrases like “happy as a clam” and “free as a bird.” However, other comparisons, like the Bengal tiger story, appeal to racial bias and raise fairness concerns under the law.

“We do not deny that the moral of the prosecutor’s story was a permissible one: That a defendant exhibiting appropriate courtroom decorum might have behaved differently at the time of the capital crimes. But the prosecutor did not tell the story as though she were merely pulling a page from Aesop’s Fables,” Kruger wrote.

Specifically, Kruger took issue with the prosecutor “embellishing” the story of the Bengal tiger, describing the animal as “enormous,” with his “muscles all flexed out,” “claws out,” “fangs” visible, and growling and placed the tiger deep in the “jungle.”

“None of these embellishments, to be sure, explicitly appealed to racial bias. But they nonetheless evoked a well-known history of the use of language demeaning Black individuals through comparisons to hyperpredatory ‘jungle’ animals …,” she said.

The court also found that the prosecutor’s use of the word “thug” when describing Bankston similarly acted as an appeal to racial bias.

“Though the prosecutor may not have intended her language as any kind of appeal to racial bias, the penalty phase argument as a whole employed, as a kind of secondary running theme, images and descriptions that have historically been associated with bias,” Kruger said.

The attorney general also conceded that the Bengal tiger analogy relied on racially discriminatory language and that the error was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, warranting reversal of Bankston’s death sentence.

While the court vacated Bankston’s death penalty, it otherwise affirmed the lower court’s judgment. The case now returns to the trial court, where prosecutors may decide whether to seek a new penalty phase trial.

Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero and Associate Justices Carol A. Corrigan, Justice Joshua P. Groban and Retired Associate Justice Martin J. Jenkins, sitting by designation, concurred.

Associate Justices Goodwin H. Liu and Kelli Evans filed separate concurring opinions.

Representatives for the parties did not immediately respond to a request for comment.