Ex-prosecutor makes anti-Jewish claim: may result in death penalty appeals

[rainbow4321]

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/national/index.ssf?/base/national-41/111142530322200.xml&storylist=national

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A former prosecutor's claim that he conspired with a judge to keep Jewish jurors off a death penalty case will be the focus of a court hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

The California Supreme Court ordered the hearing in San Jose to investigate the sworn statement of John "Jack" Quatman, who said he and other lawyers in the Alameda County district attorney's office routinely used peremptory challenges to keep Jews and black women off juries in capital cases.

Quatman's testimony was filed on behalf of Fred Freeman, who was sentenced to death in 1987 for killing a bar patron during a robbery in Berkeley. As the prosecutor assigned to Freeman's trial, Quatman said he colluded with the late Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stanley Golde to keep Jewish jurors from hearing the case. "No Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber," Quatman alleges the judge, who was himself of Jewish descent, told him.

Excluding jurors based on religion, race or ethnicity violates state and federal law and are grounds for a new trial. If Quatman's claims are proven to have merit, they could provide grounds for appeals of other death penalty cases in which he and Golde were involved.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. This is just freakin weird.

If, as he claims, no Jew would vote to send a defendent to the gas chamber, how is it that he, of Jewish descent, is collaborating to violate federal law in efforts to do that very thing?

[XemaSab]

2. Good call

Maybe there's a difference between voting to sentance someone to death and CONSIPRING to sentance someone to death????

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. I'd ask the rabbi

but I'm no longer practicing. After all, you can only practice so long without getting it right...

[11cents]

4. Golde himself was against the death penalty

There's some reason to doubt Quatman's story, I think. It was an open secret that prosecutors wanted to keet Jews off death penalty juries (and the statistics certainly suggest that they were kept off), but it's hard to believe that the judge would have actually admonished a prosecutor for not doing so.