SAN JOSE — A judge has granted the prison release of Dana Stubblefield, the former San Francisco 49ers star whose 2020 rape conviction was overturned in December, while authorities weigh a decision to re-file charges.
Stubblefield was not immediately freed following a Friday bail hearing in a San Jose courtroom, though his attorneys expected that to happen within 24 hours. He must first go back to Corcoran State Prison for processing.
“The mistakes are getting corrected, and one of the first ones, Dana’s going to be home with his family,” lead defense attorney Kenneth Rosenfeld said after the hearing. “We look forward to clearing his name. The fight has just begun.”
Stubblefield was in a San Jose courtroom on Friday after being transported from the Central Valley prison where he was more than three years into a 15-year sentence. However, he was not brought into the actual courtroom because his attorneys clashed with court deputies over their refusal to let him appear in civilian clothes, rather than his prison attire.
The bail hearing was held after more than a month of legal wrangling among Stubblefield’s legal team, the Office of the California Attorney General and Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Hector Ramon over whether the local court had jurisdiction to consider Stubblefield’s potential release.
Ultimately, the Sixth District Court of Appeal on Wednesday formally ordered Ramon to hold the hearing. After weighing the conviction reversal and Stubblefield’s absence of any misbehavior while out on bail during trial, Ramon ordered that Stubblefield be “released immediately.” But because of California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation protocols requiring him to return to Corcoran first, he did not walk out of the courthouse.
Stubblefield’s conviction and sentence were vacated by the Sixth District Court of Appeal in a Dec. 26 ruling that determined the county district attorney’s office violated the state’s Racial Justice Act during closing trial arguments.
The appellate judges took particular issue with an explanation given for why police did not search Stubblefield’s home for a gun, which was claimed to have been used during the alleged 2015 rape of a prospective babysitter at his Morgan Hill home. Deputy District Attorney Tim McInerney spoke of a “storm of controversy” that would have arisen from a police search of a famous Black man, which led to the higher court ruling that it allowed jurors to “feel justified or even compelled by misguided notions of racial fairness to overlook or discount the absence of a gun” when determining Stubblefield’s guilt.
Stubblefield — who played for the 49ers from 1993 to 2001 as a tackle and was NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1997 — and his defense team have long argued that he engaged in a paid sexual encounter with his accuser, identified in the appellate ruling as Jane Doe, and that while he initially lied to cover up the tryst, never assaulted her.
McInerney mentioned in court Friday that the attorney general’s office has appealed the Sixth District ruling to the California Supreme Court — on the grounds that the Racial Justice Act finding did not justify invalidating the jury verdict — and stated his office’s intention to re-file charges. In objecting to Stubblefield’s release, he stood by the conviction he secured and argued with the defense team’s reading of the reversal decision.
“To call him innocent is a misstatement of the opinion,” McInerney said. “The evidence at trial was strong.”
Allen Sawyer, Rosenfeld’s co-counsel who also defended Stubblefield at trial, contends that any new trial would be compromised by the legal violations committed by authorities, on top of challenges including witness memories being faded by a decade of time passed.
“We hope that this is the end of the road,” Sawyer said. “But if it’s not, we’ll keep fighting.”