DA Jenkins ‘lied to the State Bar,’ retired judge says, and should face stiffer discipline

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Sending District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to an ethics diversionary program would be pointless, according to a pair of appeals filed this month.

“Jenkins has accepted no responsibility for her own actions,” reads a lengthy appeal submitted to the State Bar this month by retired judge Martha Goldin.  

The State Bar in April ordered Jenkins to participate in an ethics diversionary program some 2.5 years after Goldin and former San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Grayner filed Bar complaints against her. 

While the 2022 complaints contained myriad allegations, the Bar ultimately “required” Jenkins to attend the course based on only one: Her accessing and dissemination of a confidential rap sheet in a case she wasn’t involved in.  

Now both Goldin and Grayner argue that diversion, which is intended to “rehabilitate” attorneys, is neither adequate nor suitable, and both have appealed the Bar’s decision. Goldin’s appeal also presents “new evidence” to back its claims that “Jenkins lied to the State Bar.” 

In her appeal, Goldin lists instances in which attorneys received far more severe punishments than diversion for middling transgressions, such as allowing a client to directly pay a lawyer’s landlord (one-year suspension) or failing to pay $8,000 in sanctions (six months). 

“The State Bar should reopen this matter, because diversion is simply the wrong result for an attorney who fails to show the slightest remorse or acknowledgement of error,” Goldin wrote.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office declined to comment for this story. 

Jenkins obtained and shared a confidential rap sheet

The most serious of the complaints leveled against Jenkins, and the only one the Bar initially felt merited discipline, is this: In October 2021, shortly before she and a colleague, Don du Bain, left the office of DA Chesa Boudin office to work on the campaign to recall their erstwhile boss, Jenkins accessed the confidential rap sheet for Troy McAlister.

McAlister was a serial felon on parole who struck and killed two women on New Year’s Eve 2020 while driving a stolen car and purportedly high on methamphetamine. Jenkins had no connection to his case. Nor did du Bain, to whom she sent the rap sheet at 10 p.m. on a Saturday, using his personal email. Mission Local first broke this story in November 2022.

The contents of this rap sheet — which, by some alchemy, found its way into the campaign in which Jenkins and du Bain were participating — factored into the ultimately successful recall of Boudin. Following Boudin’s ouster, then-Mayor London Breed appointed Jenkins DA.

Under California law, it is a misdemeanor to send a rap sheet to someone who is not authorized to view it. One must demonstrate both a “right to know” and a “need to know” to access and view this confidential material, which can only be used for “law-enforcement purposes.” 

To obtain and maintain access to the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), the system that Jenkins used to view and download the rap sheet, users need to pass a test every two years that clearly spells out these requirements. These are matters that prosecutors, paralegals and even interns in a DA’s office learn on or near their first day in the office.

Pair of appeals ask for more serious penalty

The State Bar, in an April letter to Grayner, indicated that it believed that Jenkins had potentially broken the law: “There is evidence that Jenkins should not have accessed or handled McAlister’s rap sheet in the way she did, given the statutory limits on access and use of criminal history information,” the State Bar wrote.

Jenkins’ office, however, insists that no wrongdoing took place. In an April email to Mission Local, it claimed that, as du Bain was an employee of the DA’s office, he was authorized to receive this rap sheet, so no misdemeanor occurred. The DA’s office asked Mission Local to “clarify/correct” an April 9 article on the matter.  

The DA’s claim appears to directly contravene the findings of the State Bar, as well as the interpretation of state law espoused by numerous experts, including several current and former elected district attorneys who spoke with Mission Local. 

The DA’s office has yet to explain why either Jenkins or du Bain, who were not assigned to this case, had either a “right to know” or a “need to know” the content of McAlister’s rap sheet — let alone both — or what law-enforcement purpose was served by its downloading and dissemination. 

“Just because you work in the DA’s office doesn’t mean you have access to everyone’s criminal files or confidential information,” former San Francisco and Los Angeles DA George Gascón told Mission Local last month. “That is not the way it works.”  

“The simple fact of being a deputy district attorney does not authorize you to access anyone’s records at any time,” added Stanford University law professor George Fisher, a former prosecutor. 

Mission Local did not issue a clarification or a correction.

Jenkins ‘lied to the State Bar,’ former judge says

Separate from the McAlister matter, Judge Goldin’s appeal to the State Bar describes “new evidence” that “Jenkins lied to the State Bar.” 

Goldin’s appeal is based, in part, on Jenkins’ statements to the Bar about her successful 2021 prosecution of Daniel Gudino, a mentally ill man found guilty of gruesomely murdering his own mother.

In 2023, the Court of Appeal found that Jenkins committed prosecutorial misconduct, although it declined to reverse the guilty verdict or free Gudino. Specifically, the court found that during her closing argument, Jenkins improperly made reference to excluded evidence and impugned the integrity of Gudino’s public defender.

In an April letter to Goldin, the Bar wrote that Jenkins explained her statements about the opposing counsel during the case, telling Bar investigators that defense experts had not been provided key evidence “until the evening before Gudino testified.” 

The Bar also wrote that Jenkins told its investigators it appeared Gudino knew that he was killing his mother “based on what he told the jury.” The problem here, Goldin notes in her appeal, is that Gudino never testified. 

She submits the appellant’s brief and a witness statement as proof of this. Gudino’s public defender, Ilona Yañez, confirmed to Mission Local that Gudino did not testify.

“Jenkins’ defense to the State Bar,” Goldin writes, “seems to be built around her repeated false claim that Mr. Gudino testified.”

A ‘very new attorney’

In another case, writes Goldin, Bar investigators say Jenkins told them that she provided incorrect instructions to a jury in 2014 about a defendant’s decision not to testify because she was a “very new attorney” who “naively repeated the judge who first made the error.”

But, Goldin notes, Jenkins was not new, and it was not the judge who made the mistake: In 2014, Jenkins had already been a lawyer for some eight years; she was admitted to the Georgia State Bar in November 2006, and the California State Bar in June 2011. 

Court transcripts of the case, which Goldin included in her appeal, also indicate that the flawed jury instructions were provided by Jenkins, not the judge, Gerardo Sandoval (whom Jenkins would excoriate by name on social media in 2025). 

Jenkins’ mistake was serious enough that defendant Ronnie Wilborn’s conviction was subsequently overturned.

Finally, in another matter, the Bar wrote in April that Jenkins chalked up a statement she made in a September 2022 candidate forum — that she had never committed misconduct — to the “intense pressure” felt during the debate. This would require disregarding the 2014 Wilborn case, and, in her May appeal, Goldin provided two other non-debate instances in which Jenkins made the same claim. 

‘Weaponizing’ the process?

In April, responding to the State Bar’s diversion decision, Jenkins stated that “political opponents, who were ardent supporters of Chesa, attempted to weaponize the State Bar’s complaint process.” In her May rejoinder, Goldin uses this against her. 

“Jenkins has accepted no responsibility for her own actions,” reads Goldin’s appeal. “She derided well-founded complaints as an attempt to ‘weaponize’ the State Bar process and her staff asked a journalist to minimize the nature of her misconduct. It could not be clearer that diversion will not be effective at achieving its stated goals in this case.”

Grayner, like Goldin, calls on the Bar to do more: “Rather than accept accountability for her misconduct, which the State Bar has only conditionally determined requires her to participate in diversion, Brooke Jenkins is intentionally misrepresenting the law and the State Bar’s findings to boost her public image.”