The San Francisco city controller will scrutinize a steep rise in criminal cases that has become so burdensome for the city’s court system over the past months that judges said this week they may release suspects who do not have access to lawyers.
The controller is taking a hard look at case loads in both the district attorney’s office and the public defender’s office. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has prosecuted more misdemeanor cases in her three years in office than her predecessor, Chesa Boudin, and the public defender’s office has been subsequently pushed to a “breaking point,” Public Defender Mano Raju said.
Public defenders in May they began declaring themselves “unavailable” for new criminal cases one day a week. In a letter that month, Chief Attorney Matt Gonzalez with the public defender’s office wrote that the office had seen 200 more cases than usual during the first four months of this year.
The court system is feeling the burden. It’s “facing an unprecedented number of misdemeanor cases, most of which must be brought to trial within 45 days,” said a San Francisco Superior Court statement.
Jenkins, for her part, described the public defender’s unavailability as a “dereliction of duty” the court was “complicit” in for releasing “felons,” instead of appointing the public defender to take them on.
It’s not just public defenders who say they are overwhelmed. To meet demand, private defense attorneys with the San Francisco Bar Association had been taking cases that would have been assigned to public defenders. But this week, the Bar said it can no longer accept new clients.
The strain of more cases prompted Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office in August to ask the controller, who manages the city’s finances and conducts audits, to look into the DA’s and public defender’s workloads.
That report, which is underway, will be used to “consider future staff” for both offices, said Kate Poltrack, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office. Both the DA and public defender’s office had asked for more funding this budget cycle.
The public defender’s office said it would embrace the investigation. In a Sept. 16 letter to Steven Betz, the mayor’s assistant chief of public safety, Raju wrote that he would “welcome an audit by the Controller’s Office.”
His office is “duty bound to decline new cases when — due to understaffing and underfunding by the City — accepting new cases will compromise the quality of representation we can provide to our existing clients,” Raju added.
“We are fully cooperating with the Mayor’s Office and Controller’s Office in this analysis,” the DA’s office said in a statement.
“The study will look at the staffing and caseloads of each agency and provide the Mayor’s Office with recommendations for ways to optimize funding for our agencies and strengthen the criminal justice system.”
Jenkins’ three years in office have been marked by a focus on quality-of-life crimes, many of which are misdemeanors. “We are a city bogged down in low-level crime,” she said in May.
If her department is unable to continue with its current pace of prosecutions, she said, “We will see a lack of accountability that moves us backwards in many of the issues we’re working hard to resolve on our streets.”
Misdemeanor prosecutions rose by 9 percent over the last year. Diversions, meanwhile, which let defendants complete alternative programs to have their records expunged, have fallen during Jenkins’ time in office.
In recent weeks, arrestees have been kept in jail longer, until an attorney can be found to take their case. Sheriff’s deputies often bring defendants to court for a hearing, only to take them back to jail when there is no one to represent them.
The pattern became so common that deputies began moving defendants with upcoming hearings to jails closer to the court, sources said, so they could transfer them more quickly.
The length of time defendants had to wait for an attorney reached what one person working in the court described as a “danger zone” last week: A person cannot be held in San Francisco jail for more than 48 hours if court is in session.
If a judge cannot hear their case within the time period required by law, they are forced to dismiss it.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco Superior Court announced it would be required to release some prisoners from pretrial custody because they had been waiting too long for representation.
Representatives from the public defender and DA’s offices will gather in San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harry Dorfman’s courtroom on Monday morning to discuss the spiraling problem of the lawyer shortage.
It’s an issue that repeatedly interrupts the judge’s felony arraignment schedule.
“Are we ready to do some work?” Dorfman asked his courtroom on Wednesday morning.
Dorfman paused, and corrected himself: “Are we able to do some work?”
The SF jail population was double its size 15 years ago and we didn’t have this problem. Seems like the public defender is running an incompetent organization and needs to be replaced. Alternatively, didn’t we just find a bunch of legal aid lawyers to help with civil matters? Surely criminal detention is more urgent and should get the money instead.
Maybe if they didn’t string cases along for such ridiculous periods of time they would have more bandwidth to take on new ones.
Maybe if we didn’t have trials at all and just declared people guilty or innocent based on whatever whims and suggestions morons come up with… but we don’t, we have a legal process and you deviate from those principles at your personal peril. Think harder please.
You don’t understand the difference between jail and court?
Or are you pretending to be this obtuse?
I actually understand the difference really well. I was a paid consultant to the DA’s office under both Gascon and Boudin and helped build the statistical triage tools they use to decide which defendants to release pending trial.
“I was a paid consultant to the DA’s office under both Gascon and Boudin and helped build the statistical triage tools they use to decide which defendants to release pending trial.”
And yet you decided the best use of your time every single day was to pretend the poor are the enemy of SF and that people accused of crimes don’t legally have due process to defend themselves, that all of that is unnecessary fetishism.
Sure. Post your CV anytime if you expect anyone to believe that, because we do not.
Actually no I spend most of my time everyday making money to put food on the table for my family and a very nice roof over our heads. As a hobby, I get innumerate people worked up and spend time trying to insult me personally for making obvious statistical observations.
So the Public Defender made the decision that they could only defend so many cases. Should the District Attorney look at our resources and decide she can only prosecute so many cases?
Other city agencies have budgets to which they must keep. Why is law enforcement different?
SFPD keeps asking for more OT, and the DA files more and more petitions. Should they be limited?
The city needs to fully fund the Public Defender’s Office so they can hire and retain attorneys – new ones and perhaps retired ones – to keep the courts functioning in a way that IT SEEMS we want.
SF wants to arrest people for everything – and like it or not many of the charges are not felonies – and people in America deserve a lawyer when they are being accused of a crime.
The solution is simple if anyone wants to take an honest look.
Awesome, we have a DA who is actually prosecuting criminals! What a concept.
The “it’s just a misdemeanor” line is so tiresome. Misdemeanors are crimes. They can include indecent exposure, domestic and sexual battery, a third DUI, driving with a suspended license, elder abuse, embezzlement, and assault with a deadly weapon.
Learn the difference between felonies and misdemeanors so you can teach Broke Jankey.
And takes illegal campaign funds while pretending to be a “volunteer” and disclosing sensitive sealed case information to political campaigns and lying about it and mistaking felonies and misdemeanors and lying about her predecessor and giving big sloppy hugs to DUI hit-and-run sheriffs and then dropping all charges…
I guess if you like a shamelessly corrupt DA, she’s your pick.
Pete – if you don’t like the laws enforced that keep us safe, I suggest you move elsewhere. Protecting criminals is not the priority, and fingers crossed, the progressives are done in this city!
Fingers crossed you learn how to read before you vote again.
Lawyer said phonetically backwards is royal. Hmm hmm.
What do the numbers say? Over the past ten years, how many misdemeanor cases has each public defender supported? Felony? Are there any spikes in the data? Why? What about staffing levels at the public defenders’ office? Any trends there?
I don’t know if progressives had lobotomy but having DA that enforces laws is a great thing!
Did you read and understand the part where people arrested will be let go without charges because they won’t get a court date in time?
Too bad she doesn’t enforce them on herself too I guess!
Commenters who actually read articles would be a great thing too!