I actually don't know this. Java creators were well aware of Common Lisp when they were working on Java (the famous quote from Guy Steele, "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."), but for whatever reason they've adopted the stack-destroying approach instead of the Lisp one.

The original language was designed to run on small devices and I don't think the designers thought of it as a useful feature for their kind of application domain. Steele wasn't even there at that time. Gosling also had only implemented a weak variant of Lisp (Mocklisp) before.

I'm not very knowledgeable but Java was designed as a compromise. But for instance anonymous inner classes, AFAICR, were put as a false lambdas but never really emphasized. Not surprised they left out a condition system.. the exceptions were already a step up ?