Who Is Responible for the Forged Morales Declarations?

Who is Kathleen Culhane?

Well, we know that her name appears on five false juror declarations submitted by Ken Starr and David Senior on behalf of rapist and murderer Michael Morales.

We know that her name appears on at least one false witness declarations submitted by Ken Starr and David Senior on behalf of rapist and murderer Michael Morales.

We know that she submitted her own declaration that is false.

We know that Starr and Senior where notified on February 6th that at least one declaration was false.

We know that Starr and Senior stood by her declarations until they were all withdrawn on Monday the 13th. (See Michael Morales' Clemency for links.)

But who is Kathleen Culhane?

According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle she:

was employed by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center between 2001 and 2005, the agency said Thursday.

The California Department of Consumer Affairs said she was not a licensed investigator.

And that's about it.

The Associated Press tried to talk to her but "Culhane declined to speak with them last week and her San Francisco phone was disconnected Thursday. The address listed on a business card she left with one juror led to a San Francisco business that rents post office boxes."

She has hired an attorney though.

Her attorney, Stuart Hanlon, said Culhane committed no wrongdoing and that there was no discrepancy with the signatures she submitted and the ones obtained by state investigators.

"We're comfortable that she didn't do anything wrong and we want to investigate the case," Hanlon said. San Francisco Chronicle

We'll see if he eats these words much like Senior did when he accused the prosecutors of intimidating the jurors whose names were on forged declarations submitted by Culhane.

It will also remain to be seen what if anything happens to Starr, Senior and Ben Weston, another Morales attorney.

Some experts with third hand information believe they are off the hook:

Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara School of law professor, said there was no ethical breach by either lawyer because they trusted an investigator who signed sworn declarations that she was telling the truth. In addition, Culhane worked four years at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, which gave her work high marks. San Francisco Chronicle

Once Starr and Senior were on notice of problems with the declarations, "they acted apparently immediately and exactly appropriately,'' said Monroe Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University in New York and a national authority on legal ethics. San Francisco Chronicle

But Mr. Freedman, they did NOT do that. They were put on notice on Monday the 6th and their response was to accuse the DA's office of coercion of a witness and then they submitted 5 more forged declarations by Culhane.

While currently there is no evidence that any of them has anything to do with the forgeries, I and others believe that ultimately, as attorneys, they bear an ethical obligation not present documents with out a good faith belief in them.

One who disagreed was Walnut Creek attorney Carol Langford, who teaches at UC Hastings College of the Law and is co-author of the textbook "Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law.'' She said Starr and Senior should have known something was amiss when prosecutors first presented evidence that the prosecution witness' recantation was forged.

"My view is that these lawyers were trying so zealously for their client that they crossed the line,'' she said. San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco attorney Richard Zitrin, who has written three books on legal ethics and teaches a course on the subject at Hastings and the University of San Francisco, said the defense lawyers were obliged to "sit down with the investigator and give her the third degree'' after the first hint that she might have forged a document.

Besides a lawyer's duty not to mislead a court or a governor, Zitrin said, "you also have an obligation to your client not to present false testimony, because it's going to come out and your client is going to get slammed.'' San Francisco Chronicle

Deputy District Attorney Robert Himelblau said Starr and Senior, the lawyers who prepared the clemency papers, may not have known of the alleged fabrications but were responsible for the documents they filed.

"The buck stops here,'' Himelblau said. After accusing the prosecutors of dishonesty in the exchange over Felix, he said, the lawyers now "owe an explanation to the district attorney's office, to the governor, to the jurors who (they) lied about, to the witnesses who (they) lied about, and finally to the people.'' San Francisco Chronicle