LOS ANGELES — Dozens of death penalty convictions in Alameda County must be reviewed after prosecutors there were found to have intentionally excluded Black and Jewish jurors during a murder trial in 1995, a federal judge ordered.

Handwritten notes from prosecutors in the decades-old case suggests the attorneys were involved in "serious misconduct," but Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price on Monday said additional evidence suggests more death penalty cases may have been tainted by prosecutors trying to keep Black and Jewish jurors from murder trials.

"It's not limited to one or two prosecutors, but a variety of prosecutors," Price said during a news conference Monday. "The evidence that we have uncovered suggests plainly that many people did not receive a fair trial in Alameda County and as a result, we have to review all the files."

The order was by U.S. Federal Court District Judge Vince Chhabria after the notes from prosecutors were discovered in the case of Earnest Dykes, who was convicted in 1993 of the death of a 9-year-old during an attempted robbery. He was sentenced to death.

Dykes' petition to review his case has been pending in federal court for years.

"These notes — especially when considered in conjunction with evidence presented in other cases — constitute strong evidence that, in prior decades, prosecutors from the office were engaged in a pattern of serious misconduct, automatically excluding Jewish and African American jurors in death penalty cases," Chhabria wrote in a decision to make the notes public.

In a portion of the notes released by the district attorney's office, prosecutors wrote and underlined the word, "Jewish" about a prospective juror in the case.

Price did not give more specifics about the evidence prosecutors uncovered in the cases being reviewed, but said it included notes as well as transcripts about what questions prospective jurors were asked.

The Alameda prosecutors aren't the only officials in the county's criminal justice system to have been accused of improperly excluding people from a jury. In 2006, the California Supreme Court rejected claims that an Alameda County Superior Court judge had advised a prosecutor to remove Jewish jurors from a death penalty trial.

Attorneys are allowed to remove a certain number of prospective jurors from a case, but are not allowed to do so because of their race, gender, or religion.

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