California Appeals Court Overturns Ex-NFL Star Dana Stubblefield’s Rape Conviction

A California appellate court has overturned the rape conviction of former San Francisco 49ers defensive tackle Dana Stubblefield – finding it “legally invalid” – on the grounds of racial bias.

On Thursday, the Santa Clara County Sixth District Court of Appeal vacated the former NFL star’s conviction and prison sentence, saying that the prosecution’s statements during the trial “constituted ‘racially discriminatory language about’ Stubblefield’s race” and violated the California Racial Justice Act of 2020, which makes it illegal to obtain a conviction “on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.”

In 2020, Stubblefield was sentenced to 15 to years to life after a jury found him guilty of rape by force using a firearm, oral copulation by force and false imprisonment after prosecutors said he had lured an intellectually disabled woman to his home in April 2015 with the promise of a babysitting job.

During the trial, the prosecution had alleged that Stubblefield had threatened the woman with a handgun. In closing arguments, which were made eight weeks after George Floyd was murdered by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a prosecutor said police had not searched Stubblefield’s house after the woman reported the incident, based partly on the fact that he was a famous Black man and doing so would have caused “a storm of controversy,” according to a court filing.

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In its Thursday opinion overturning the conviction, the appeals court wrote: “The statement implied the house might have been searched and a gun found had Stubblefield not been Black, and that Stubblefield therefore gained an undeserved advantage at trial because he was a Black man.

“Second, the claim that a search would ‘open up a storm of controversy’ implicitly referenced the events that followed George Floyd’s then-recent killing, appealing to racially biased perceptions of those events and associating Stubblefield with them based on his race,” it added.

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