SAN JOSE — An appellate court has overturned the 2020 rape conviction of ex-San Francisco 49ers star Dana Stubblefield , ruling that the prosecution violated the Racial Justice Act by stating at trial that his status as a famous Black man was why police never searched his house for a gun he was accused of using during the crime. In an opinion published Thursday, the San Jose-based Sixth District Court of Appeal declared that Stubblefield’s conviction is “legally invalid” and also vacated his subsequent 15-year prison sentence . Stubblefield, who played for the 49ers from 1993 to 2001 — and was NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1997 — has been in state prison since 2021 while his appeal was litigated.
The now 54-year-old was convicted of raping, with the threat of a gun, a woman who had come to his Morgan Hill home to interview for a babysitting job in 2015. “We’re over the moon,” Allen Sawyer, who served as Stubblefield’s trial attorney, along with Ken Rosenfeld, said in an interview Thursday. “We knew from the day we stepped out of this courtroom when the jury came back, that this was not over, that this would not stand.
” As a result of the higher court’s ruling, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office now has to decide whether to re-file charges and prosecute the case again. There is no clear timeline on when that might happen. The DA’s office declined to offer specific comment on the ruling, saying in a statement, “We are studyin.
