A federal judge in Los Angeles refused on Tuesday to look into whether the government committed prosecutorial misconduct in its criminal stock options backdating case against former KB Home Chief Executive Officer Bruce Karatz.
Karatz’s lawyer, John Keker, founding partner of San Francisco’s Keker & Van Nest, asked for an evidentiary hearing after another judge tossed out a similar case against two former executives of Broadcom Corp. In the Broadcom case, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of the Central District of California, who sits in Santa Ana, found numerous examples of prosecutorial misconduct, including intimidation and improper influencing of witnesses.
