The strange, sad saga of Dana Stubblefield took an abrupt turn this week as the former San Francisco 49ers’ star’s 2020 rape conviction that was recently vacated is keeping him in prison after all. Santa Clara County’s Superior Court Judge Hector Ramon said he couldn’t grant bail or release Stubblefield because the case remains under the jurisdiction of an appeals court. In 1993 Stubblefield won Defensive Rookie of the Year as a quick, powerful lineman and four years later was voted Defensive Player of the Year. He went to three Pro Bowls and won a ring in Super Bowl XXIX with the Niners, before ending his 11-year career in stints with the Washington Redskins and Oakland Raiders. After retiring in 2004, Stubblefield got into various legal trouble. In 2010 he was sentenced to 90 days in jail for stealing his girlfriend’s mail and in 2016 was charged with sexually assaulting a disabled woman. He was sent to prison for 15 years in 2020 for his conviction in the case. But the appeals court has overturned the rape conviction, ruling that prosecutors in the case made racially discriminatory statements during the Black man’s trial. The Sixth Court of Appeals found that prosecutors violated the California Racial Justice Act of 2020, a law passed during a summer of protest over the police killing of George Floyd. The measure bars prosecutors from seeking a criminal conviction or imposing a sentence on the basis of race.
The case was “infected with tremendous error from the minute we started the trial,” said Stubblefield’s lead attorney, Kenneth Rosenfeld.
But now the appellate court’s remittitur, a technical ruling that returns jurisdiction to the lower court, is not expected to be issued until next month. In a motion filed earlier this week, the attorneys said the judge had the authority to transfer the ex-NFL player from California State Prison, Corcoran – where he has served close to four years of a 15-year sentence – to county jail, and then grant his release on bail. That would effectively return Stubblefield to the same status that he had pretrial, which they argue is his current legal standing, the news outlet reported. “As he sits here, everything has been vacated, he has been convicted of nothing, and a legally innocent man is sitting in prison because we’re waiting on a time clock,” attorney Ken Rosenfeld said.
