Jasmine Richards (later Jasmine Abdullah), founder of Black Lives Matter's Pasadena chapter, was convicted in June 2016 of "attempted lynching" — California's statutory term, dating to 1933, for taking a person from police custody — after she tried to pull a young Black woman away from officers at a peace march the previous summer. Governor Jerry Brown had signed a bill striking the word "lynching" from the statute in 2015, after an earlier BLM case drew attention to it, but the offense itself remained, and prosecutors deployed it against the movement's local leadership.

Richards served roughly a month of a ninety-day sentence, but the case's significance outran its length: she is widely described as the first Black person convicted under the California lynching statute, in a prosecution that turned an anti-mob-violence law born of white lynch mobs against a Black woman organizing against police violence. Movement lawyers cited the case alongside Joshua Williams's as evidence of a deliberate strategy — decapitating chapters by criminalizing their founders — and "felony lynching" entered the movement's lexicon as shorthand for the legal system's capacity for historical irony.