Californian judge allegedly "excluded Jews and black women" from murder trials

A former California prosecutor has testified that he colluded with a judge to exclude Jewish jurors in a murder trial in which the defendant was ultimately sentence to death. John Quatman said he and the late judge Stanley Golde, at the judge's urging, conspired to shape the jury so it would likely send the killer to death row. Some of the most damaging evidence presented was Quatman's recollection of a lecture he said the judge gave him privately while they were picking a jury in the capital case of Fred Freeman, a white man later sentenced to death for killing a bar patron during a robbery in Berkeley. "No Jewish person can sit on a death penalty jury and vote for death", the judge said, according to Quatman. Quatman, now a criminal defense attorney in Montana, appeared at the hearing on Freeman's behalf. The California Supreme Court had ordered the hearing after Quatman's allegations surfaced two years ago. Allegedly, other defense lawyers have told the court that the Alameda County district attorney's office had an unwritten policy of excluding Jews and black women from murder trial juries from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. The policy was based on the theory those jurors would be lenient to defendants.