Four California counties with majority Latino/a populations have no Latino judges

Byrhonda Lyons reports for CalMatters under the headline, "In absentia:  No Latino Judges in these Majority-Latino Counties."  Here's an excerpt:  

In Colusa County, where 60% of the population is Latino, both of the Superior Court judges — who handle everything from disorderly conduct to murder trials — are white.

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Colusa is one of four majority-Latino California counties — along with Kings, Madera, and Merced — with no Latino judges in any superior courtrooms. Latino representation on the bench in three of those counties has not improved much since the state began collecting judicial diversity data 14 years ago. And the fourth, Kings — which had one Latino judge in 2007 — is back down to zero.

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In 13 other California counties, there’s a gap of 30 percentage points or more between the percentage of Latinos in the population and the percentage of Latino judges. The gaps tend to be greatest in the Central Valley, but also include counties such as Los Angeles, Monterey and San Bernardino.

All of the majority-Latino counties with no Latino judge(s) are considered "rural" in the California imaginary, primarily because of their agriculture-focused economies.  The least populous among them is Colusa, population 21, 419.  It is about an hour north of Sacramento.  The others are farther south in the San Joaquin Valley.  In Tweeting about this, journalist Lyons notes how this phenomenon links to the rural lawyer shortage, which in turn is driven by the waning desire of law graduates to "go rural."  

Lyons does a great job at explaining what's at stake for litigants from this lack of judicial diversity: 

In California, bench representation is worse for Latinos than any other racial group.

And such disparities can have effects that ripple through individual lives and entire communities. Research indicates that racially diverse judges and women judges tend to assess certain cases differently, on average, from their white and male counterparts.

And while roughly 60% of white and Asian-Americans felt California county courts were fair over half the time, only about 40% of Latinos felt the same, according to a study commissioned by the California Judicial Council.

This Sacramento Bee story by Jason Pohl from last December, also makes some points similar to the CalMatters story regarding the impact of white legal decision makers--be they judges or juries--on litigants and defendants of color.