The former Alameda County prosecutor who accused a Jewish judge of colluding with him to keep Jews off a capital jury has been declared “dishonest and unethical.”
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Kevin Murphy threw out the allegations of John “Jack” Quatman, who claimed that Judge Stanley Golde chided him for trying to include Jews on a 1987 murder trial. Had Murphy concluded Quatman’s allegations carried weight, it could have resulted in a new trial for Fred Freeman, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in that trial.
In his Tuesday, April 5, ruling, the judge found “ample evidence” that Quatman, currently in private practice in Montana, concocted the story to smear Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff, who took Quatman off capital cases in 1993.
The ruling was seen as a victory for Golde’s many supporters. The dean of Alameda County Superior Court judges prior to his death in 1998, the Temple Sinai congregant was recalled as an extremely ethical man who earned the nickname “The Maven.”
“A man such as Stanley Golde, so committed to his Judaism and the justice system, could not, would not conspire to commit an unethical act, anti-Semitic or any other,” longtime friend Maurice Engel wrote to j.
Added Golde’s son, Matt, a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, “I feel gratified [my father’s] name was cleared, and cleared in a kind of procedure in which there was an evidentiary hearing and cross-examination.”
The ruling is a setback for anti-death penalty activists, who hoped Quatman’s claim that the exclusion of black women and Jews from capital juries was “standard practice” in Alameda County would lead to dozens of new trials and reversals for condemned prisoners. The Anti-Defamation League recently sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Lockyer calling for an investigation of those claims.
All along, however, anti-death penalty advocates have described the case as a “win-win situation.” Minus the conventional victory, they can still claim deep flaws in the mechanism of capital punishment if the prosecutor handling dozens of death penalty cases was deemed “dishonest and unethical.”