MARTINEZ — An appeals court has overturned murder convictions for two East Bay men, citing a Contra Costa judge’s remarks at the 2020 trial that he’d allow the prosecutor to excuse her third prospective Filipino juror but wouldn’t accept her rationale for a fourth.
The defendants, 30-year-old Christova Topete and 36-year-old Sam Nazareta, were convicted in 2020 of murdering 20-year-old Joseph West outside the Atlantic Plaza Shopping Center in Pittsburg, in 2017. Now, both men are returning to Contra Costa superior court, either to go back on trial or engage in plea deal negotiations.
In separate decisions, the First District Appellate Court reversed both men’s murder convictions, citing events that took place before the jury was even sworn in. The case hinged on a so-called Batson/Wheeler challenge — a legal claim made by Nazareta’s lawyer that Deputy District Attorney Mary Blumberg was excusing Filipino jurors based on their race.
Judge John Cope allowed two Filipino jurors to be excused for “race neutral” reasons, the court ruled, but paused when Blumberg excused a third Filipino from the jury pool because she knew little about him, the appellate decisions say. Cope added, though that he “probably won’t accept this reason any more for a challenge to a Filipino juror.”
That last remark, appellate judges ruled, “undermines all confidence” in Cope’s ruling and calls in question why he accepted Blumberg’s rationale.
“If the trial court was unwilling to accept the stated reason again, it calls into serious question why the court accepted it as genuine even as to (the prospective juror),” Nazareta’s 18-page decision says. “Considering the trial court’s reservations, it is unclear why it did not ask further questions of the prosecutor and delve further into her rationale.”
Nazareta, who is Filipino, objected at the time to the third juror dismissal. Historically, courts have set a high legal standard for overturning juror dismissals, because each attorney is allowed to excuse a certain number of people from the jury pool without having to state a reason. In 2019, the First District Appellate Court upheld a Contra Costa conviction where the prosecutor dismissed every Black person from the jury pool, even though one of the justices wrote in a fiery concurrence that the case demonstrated the need for legislative changes.
In the Nazareta decision, the court also noted that Cope said he “did not know Nazareta was Filipino and could not tell from the jurors’ names whether they were Hispanic or Filipino,” but accepted Nazareta’s lawyer’s representation that they were.
West was shot and killed after experiencing car trouble at the shopping center, and confided to his girlfriend he’d noticed two men he’d “finessed” months earlier hanging around the area. At trial, Blumberg argued that video surveillance proved Topete was the shooter and that the motive was revenge — West allegedly stole a couple ounces of marijuana from Nazareta months earlier.