Group Launches Effort to Recall Alameda County DA Pamela Price

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Y. Price is a graduate of Yale College and UC Berkeley Law School, and a survivor of the Ohio juvenile justice and foster care systems. Before being elected District Attorney in 2022, she trail-blazed a career fighting for justice for everyday people in state and federal courts. She built a successful law-firm, coordinated teams of lawyers across the country and successfully argued a landmark racial harassment case before the United States Supreme Court. DA Price has represented countless victims of retaliation, wrongful termination, sexual assaults, sex, age, religion, disability, and race-based discrimination. Her clients included nurses, doctors, electricians, oil workers, teachers, office workers, police officers and correctional officers from all walks of life.

DA Price has also spent her entire career advocating for justice for women. Her compassion for survivors is deeply rooted in her own personal experiences with sexual harassment, domestic violence, and the criminal justice system. In 1977, Pamela joined the first sexual harassment lawsuit in education and led the fight to define sexual harassment both as an experience and a legal violation. The Alexander case made sexual harassment in education illegal and presaged the #MeToo, #TimesUp and all the movements that followed.

As a survivor of domestic violence herself, DA Price is deeply aware of and sensitive to the needs of survivors of intimate partner violence. She takes these issues very seriously. In 1979, while still in law school at Berkeley, she co-founded and coordinated the Bay Area Defense Committee for Battered Women. The Committee’s Advisory Board included prominent feminists such as civil rights icon Angela Davis and lesbian and gay rights pioneer, Del Martin. In 1981, she was maliciously prosecuted by the Alameda County District Attorney’s office as a survivor of domestic violence and was successfully acquitted at trial.

DA Price started her professional legal career as a criminal defense attorney at the Bayview Hunters’ Point Community Defenders’ office in San Francisco. Her first trial was a felony robbery based on a mistaken identity and she won an acquittal for her client. As a community defender, she handled hundreds of misdemeanor and felony cases and often represented young people caught up in the criminal justice system at San Francisco’s infamous Youth Guidance Center. She left the Community Defender’s office to start a private practice in Oakland, California.

Following years of training working for small firms, DA Price started her own firm in 1991. Over the next 30 years, she represented everyday people in state and federal courts, and became a nationally recognized civil rights attorney. In 2002, Pamela Price became one of only a handful of Black women to ever argue in front of the United States Supreme Court. In that case, she successfully advocated for her client, Abner Morgan, a Black electrician, who had been subjected to constant racial harassment at his place of employment. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor, and after a ten-year battle with his employer, Amtrak.

All this work, experience and passion brought DA Price to this moment. Empowered by the people of Alameda County, she is fully committed to addressing violence in our community and especially against women and children, including the literally hundreds of crimes labelled as “domestic violence.” Intimate violence cases that result in serious bodily harm or injury which include elder abuse, family violence and intimate partner violence will be prosecuted as appropriate. When dealing with such cases, she will always prioritize the safety, needs, and desires of survivors (and children, if they are involved) and seek long term solutions that will keep families and communities safe.