California appellate court overturns pimping, trafficking conviction of East Palo Alto man – The Press Democrat

A California appeals court overturned the pimping and human trafficking conviction of an East Palo Alto man on the grounds that the trial court made a procedural error in allowing the prosecution to reject a juror for an invalid reason.

The court found that the judge in the trial of Dwayne Robinson incorrectly overturned the defense’s objection to the prosecutor rejecting a Black juror without a legally valid reason under section 231.7 of the state’s Code of Civil Procedure, which prohibits the use of peremptory challenge against a juror because of their race, ethnicity, gender or other identities, according to the ruling filed June 12 by California’s First Appellate District.

The ruling sends the case back to San Mateo County, where the district attorney’s office will have 60 days from the date the ruling was finalized to decide whether to retry the case, said San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe. Wagstaffe said his office had not made its determination as of Wednesday.

Robinson was originally convicted of one felony count of human trafficking and one felony count of pimping in November 2023 for allegedly trafficking a 22-year-old woman against her will, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to concurrent sentences of 14 and three years, according to court records.

“The judge did not create a strong enough record of or do enough inquiry to override the defense objections,” Wagstaffe said. “But we do view the case as a provable case, and we are able to retry it, so we’ll see what happens.”

Charlie Smith, Robinson’s defense attorney, said that he was happy for his client and “pleasantly surprised” by the court’s ruling.

“I didn’t expect this. It’s very rare for the appellate court to reverse a trial in its entirety and order a new trial,” Smith said.

Smith added that the trial occurred right around the time a new rule regarding peremptory challenges — motions by either side that exclude a juror — went into effect, making several reasons given by prosecutors to challenge a juror invalid. The most common of those, he added, is that the “juror expressed a negative experience with the criminal justice system.”

“It also changed the analysis in terms of whether or not the juror being kicked is the same race as either the defendant or victim, and in this case, the juror that the DA kicked was African-American and my client was African-American,” he said.

The appellate court’s ruling focused on one particular procedural issue during the jury selection portion of Robinson’s trial. The prosecution exercised a peremptory challenge against a potential juror known as R.M. During questioning, R.M. had told the court that he had “a little bias towards (the) way the judicial system ran” due to a criminal case in which he and his grandson had been victims of a man who pointed a gun at them.

Robinson’s defense objected to the challenge on the grounds that it was made because of the potential juror’s race, ethnicity or sex. The prosecution said that her primary reason for the challenge was R.M.’s discontent with the case in which he was involved. The judge acknowledged that while R.M. “appeared to be Black,” a reasonable person would not view that as a factor in the prosecution’s challenge and overruled the defense’s objection.

The prosecution argued that the challenge was not based on R.M.’s race and was rather “based on legitimate concerns regarding his ability to be fair and impartial.”

The court ruled that the prosecution’s challenge was “based explicitly and primarily on his past negative experience with the criminal justice system, a presumptively invalid reason” and lacked evidence that it “was not due to conscious or unconscious bias.”

“We accept that the record indicates the prosecutor’s primary reason for exercising the challenge was specific to R.M.,” the court said in its opinion. “But importantly, we cannot say it is highly probable that the prosecutor’s rationale was unrelated to bias and that it bore only on R.M.’s ability to be a fair and impartial juror in this case.”

At trial, prosecutors said that Robinson had taken the freedom of a victim intending to pimp her out, received money in exchange for the victim’s sex work and lived off the income from the victim’s prostitution, according to the opinion. Prosecutors at trial cited multiple alleged encounters between Robinson and police, including one in which the victim was found “hysterical and intoxicated” with a scraped knee after Robinson allegedly pushed her to the ground in April 2023.

In May 2023, Robinson allegedly brought the victim, known as “Peach,” to a Redwood City hotel, where an undercover police officer arranged to meet her, prosecutors said. Further investigation found that “Peach” had been involved in sex work with clients in Gilroy and Morgan Hill. Prosecutors further alleged that Robinson sent text messages to the victim demanding money and pressuring her to engage in sex work.

Robinson, who is currently in state prison, will remain in custody at least until a judge rules on his custody status at a hearing, Wagstaffe said. Smith added that he has reached out to the court to ask to provide an order for return, which would bring Robinson back to jail in San Mateo County.