In California, death-penalty litigation often takes decades to be resolved, and five years ago Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in the state. So last year, in an effort to ease the backlog, a few old cases were referred to a federal judge, Vince Chhabria, of the Northern District of California, for possible settlement—to see if there was a way to resentence the defendants and end their litigation. One of the cases was Dykes’s.

On the cards were handwritten notes, which Solway realized were comments about prospective jurors for Dykes’s trial, presumably compiled by the prosecutors. One card described an “MW”—male, white—who was a Republican and in favor of the death penalty. That didn’t seem too surprising, but a card for a Black woman read “Don’t believe she could vote D/P”—for the death penalty—and characterized her as a “Short, Fat, Troll.” A card for a forty-seven-year-old man said that he had a “Jewish background.” Another card, for a man who had a Ph.D. in physics, read “I liked him better than any other Jew But No Way,” then added, “Must Kick, too Risky.”