Local attorney embroiled in California investigation
A Whitefish attorney who ran for Flathead County Attorney is scheduled to testify today before a Superior Court in California about conspiring with a judge to keep Jewish jurors off a death penalty case.
The California Supreme Court ordered the hearing in San Jose today to investigate the sworn statement of John "Jack" Quatman, who was a prosecutor in California before moving to Montana.
Quatman reportedly 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. Quatman said that as the prosecutor assigned to Freeman's trial, 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.
"Judge Golde was only telling me what I already should have known to do," Quatman stated. "It was standard practice to exclude Jewish jurors in death cases."
Excluding jurors based on religion, race or ethnicity violates state and federal law and is 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. Golde died about six years ago.
Quatman, 58, may testify at the hearing before Judge Kevin Murphy. Attorneys also plan to review trial transcripts, case files and Quatman's confidential personnel records from his 26 years in the Alameda County district attorney's office.
Tom Orloff, the current district attorney for Alameda County, disputed Quatman's allegations.
Quatman's credibility is expected to be an issue in the hearing. He has had two previous murder convictions overturned because of misconduct. In one, the state Court of Appeal ruled Quatman used a "deliberate and unjustified ethnic slur" when he referred to an Afghan American defendant as a member of a guerrilla group then fighting the Soviet army.
Quatman ran for Flathead County Attorney as an independent in 2002, saying it was time for a change in the office. He advocated vigorously prosecuting "rape, robberies, murders, drugs, and domestic violence."
He touted his experience in jury trials in California, saying, "You don't have to take my word for it. I was highly successful in California."
His work included going to trial on five cases with the death-penalty trial unit, he said during the election.
He was defeated in his bid for office by then-Deputy County Attorney Ed Corrigan.
Quatman and his wife, Phyllis, both practice law in Whitefish. They were not in town Monday to comment on the California proceedings.
The investigation in California began after a social conversation in Montana, according The Recorder, a California newspaper. It reported that in May 2003, an attorney with the California Appellate Project, Scott Kauffman, was assisting Phyllis Quatman on a death penalty case from outside the Flathead when the subject came up.
Peter Keane, former dean of the Golden Gate University School of Law, said it was once common for lawyers to consider "widely overdone stereotypes" in their evaluations of potential jurors. The practice no longer is discussed openly, but undoubtedly still exists, Keane said.
"I think any lawyer who picks a jury who says, 'No, it never crosses my mind,' isn't honest," said Keane, who spent 20 years in the San Francisco public defender's office.
But Michael Rushford, president of the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty legal organization, said it will be tough for Freeman's attorneys to prove that Jewish jurors weren't selected because of religion.
"There are a hundred other reasons why you would strike a juror," he said. "They may have stated forthright that they are against the death penalty.