By A.C. Thompson

Lawyers will tell you the California Supreme Court is no friend of the 639 men and women on death row. Since voters sacked iconoclastic chief justice Rose Bird and two of her liberal, Jerry Brown-appointed colleagues back in 1986, the state's top court has very rarely overturned the sentences of the condemned.

So the court's recent statements about an old Alameda County murder case are particularly intriguing – and could undermine the convictions of at least 11 death row inmates.

In late July the court ordered prosecutors to explain why Fred H. Freeman, convicted of murdering a man during a 1984 holdup in Berkeley, shouldn't be released from San Quentin after nearly two decades on death row. Specifically, the court said it looked like "the trial judge actively colluded with the prosecutor to secure a conviction and death sentence."

The judge in question is late Alameda County Superior Court judge Stanley Golde, who died in 1998; the prosecutor is John Quatman, a former assistant Alameda County district attorney now in private practice in Montana. The key evidence is a damning declaration made by Quatman, bombshell testimony that's caused quite an eruption in the legal press but has yet to hit the mainstream media.

The ex-prosecutor claims Golde privately encouraged him to oust any Jews from the jury pool, saying "no Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber," according to the declaration, which continues, "I thanked Judge Golde for his advice, and thereafter excused any prospective juror who was Jewish." A Jew himself, Golde was active in the Jewish community.

This is no side issue. The U.S. legal system, obviously, is based on the notion that judges are impartial arbiters, not partisans who give prosecutors tips on how to send guys to the gallows.

Furthermore, Quatman alleges it was "standard practice" to keep Jews and female African Americans from serving on juries in capital cases while he was in the D.A.'s Office. Quatman implies both groups were seen as too sympathetic toward defendants.

All of this alleged exclusionary activity is forbidden under federal and state constitutional statutes, which are supposed to guarantee equal protection under the law. It's also barred by the ruling in a 1978 California case called People v. Wheeler.

Though Quatman stonewalled Freeman's lawyers for years, the ex-prosecutor was eventually convinced to reveal what happened by an outside party, San Francisco attorney Scott Kauffman, who met Quatman in Montana. The motives behind Quatman's sudden confession remain murky, and he didn't return phone calls seeking comment for this story. Freeman's attorneys are also keeping mum.

At this point, Freeman's legal team, led by Michael Laurence of the state-funded Habeas Corpus Resource Center, aren't arguing his innocence, though some of the evidence that put him away – notably the eyewitness testimony – is shaky. They simply say he was denied a fair trial.

Freeman was popped for gunning down a bar patron, Donald "Cowboy" Koger, while robbing a now-defunct watering hole called the Gilman Street Exit at about 11 p.m. on Jan. 11, 1984. In addition to Freeman, two other men were implicated in the crime.

The California supremes are only considering what Quatman and Golde may or may not have done to rig the jury-selection process. If they eventually decide there was some kind of unholy alliance and rule to void Freeman's sentence, the ramifications could be enormous, casting doubt on the integrity of countless trials presided over by the judge and litigated by the ex-prosecutor and his former colleagues in the D.A.'s Office.

During his years on the bench, Golde developed a reputation as a "hanging judge," sending 11 people to death row between 1980 and 1995 – more, it seems, than any other Alameda County judge of that era. "That's a huge number of cases; it's larger than the total number of death cases in some counties," said Lance Lindsey, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, an activist group. "People should be scared to death about those cases, about whether those were fair trials."

Answering to the court's demand for an explanation, Morris Lenk of the California Attorney General's Office fired back late last month, filing a scathing brief challenging Quatman's allegations.

Lenk went to veteran federal judge D. Lowell Jensen, a friend of Golde, for a character reference. "It is simply inconceivable that Stanley Golde would throw over a lifetime of devotion to the law and to its ethical practice, in an attempt to achieve the wrongful conviction and the wrongful imposition of a death penalty for a defendant on trial in his courtroom," stated Jensen, friends with Golde from the early 1950s until his death, in a sworn declaration.

Quatman's former boss, ex-D.A. John J. Meehan, also vigorously refutes his assertions, saying in another declaration, "In my opinion, it is dishonest for anyone to say that it was 'standard practice' to exclude jurors in death penalty cases on the ground of their religion. Our lawyers were trained to the contrary."

Like the other players in this courtroom drama, Lenk didn't want to talk about the case.

At this juncture, the court is still considering Freeman's fate, and it could be months or even years before it hands down a decision. In the meantime, it's worth pondering a few quotes culled from Quatman's declaration:

• "Fred Freeman did not fit the real-world standard for one deserving the death penalty."

• There were "problems of proof regarding Freeman's legal culpability, including questions about which of the three suspects actually shot the victim."

• Describing his treatment of a principal witness, the girlfriend of one of the other accused men, Quatman wrote, "I had to put pressure on her to testify. She showed up for trial only because I threatened to have her arrested and put in jail until the trial was over, and told her she would not want find out how long that would be."

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