Court rejects claim judge wanted jews off jury

By Julia Cheever, Bay City News Service

May 18, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - The California Supreme Court today upheld a court-appointed referee's finding that a now-deceased Alameda County Superior Court judge did not tell a prosecutor to keep Jews off the jury in a death penalty case.

The former prosecutor, John Quatman, claimed in 2003 that Judge Stanley Golde directed him to exclude Jews from the jury during a 1987 murder trial because Jews would never vote for a death penalty.

The defendant in that trial, Fred Freeman, was convicted and sentenced to death for fatally shooting a customer in a Berkeley bar during a robbery in 1984.

The claim that Golde told Quatman, the prosecutor in the case, to keep Jews off the jury was raised by Freeman in a habeas corpus petition to the state high court in 2004.

Golde, who was Jewish, died in 1998. Quatman, a retired Alameda County district attorney, was living in Montana in 2003 when he made the claim in support of Freeman.

After receiving the petition, the high court appointed Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Kevin Murphy to act as a referee to take evidence and issue findings on the claim.

Murphy concluded last year that Quatman's allegations were not true. The referee also alleged in a written report that Quatman had been "dishonest and unethical."

The state Supreme Court unanimously upheld Murphy's conclusion in a ruling issued at its San Francisco headquarters.

Justice Marvin Baxter wrote for the court, "Freeman leveled very serious allegations about Judge Golde and the conduct of his trial, but, after a full and fair evidentiary hearing, he failed to prove they were true."

The court said that evidence from the jury selection process that was presented at the hearing before Murphy showed that Quatman did not believe that three dismissed jurors were Jewish and that "even if he did, that their religion was no part of his decision to excuse them."

The court also said the evidence showed that Quatman had a poor reputation for honesty and integrity and that he had a motive for embarrassing the district attorney's office.

The motive was that Quatman was transferred out of the office's criminal trial section after he was investigated for allegedly making disparaging remarks to a woman co-worker.

The court said it will rule separately at a later date on three other habeas corpus claims raised by Freeman. If Freeman loses those claims, he can take his appeals to the federal court system.

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