The San Francisco public defender’s office has, for months, said that it does not have enough lawyers to handle the influx of criminal cases District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is prosecuting.
Now, private defense attorneys say they have become a de facto satellite office of the public defender, and are themselves at capacity.
“Every day, we scramble to see who can come in and cover,” said Julie Traun, director of court programs for the Bar Association of San Francisco, on Wednesday. Traun addressed the issue at a hearing before San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harry Dorfman’s courtroom at the Hall of Justice.
The judge has invited representatives from the Bar Association, public defender’s office, district attorney’s office, and sheriff’s department to discuss solutions to the workload crisis. He has yet to decide whether he can order the bar to recruit more lawyers, or demand the public defender do so.
District Attorney Jenkins has ramped up criminal prosecutions in San Francisco, particularly misdemeanors. She has said San Francisco is “bogged down in low-level crime.”
In May, after public defenders began declaring themselves “unavailable” to defend new cases one day a week, those clients were absorbed by the attorneys with the bar.
Their caseloads are now mounting. Private defense attorneys took on nearly half of all felony cases in October on top of their regular conflict cases, Traun said. While the bar was working with the public defender’s office, the “goalpost” of how many cases private attorneys would have to cover “kept moving.”
San Francisco routinely contracts private attorneys to take on cases when public defenders have a conflict of interest with another client.
But recently, as one such attorney put it, the Bar Association has been acting “like a second public defender’s office” and backfilling the city’s obligations to offer free criminal defense to those accused of crimes.
Now, for the first time, Traun said, the bar is also at capacity.
Between May and October, each week the bar received the names of between 10 and 20 people charged with a felony that the public defender’s office declined to represent, Traun said. To meet the extra demand, 20 defense attorneys from other jurisdictions were recruited to help the 50-some attorneys with the bar.
But then, starting in October, people arrested for felonies on Friday were also added to the Bar’s workload, Traun said. She was then told that public defenders could not represent some people arrested for misdemeanors, she added.
That opened the floodgates. At the end of just one week, the bar received the names of 48 defendants the public defender could not represent, Traun said. The process became “completely unsustainable,” she said.
The city controller is now looking into the workloads of both the public defender and district attorney’s office. That forthcoming report, which will likely be available in December, will analyze costs and review the number of cases the public defender is referring out.
At today’s hearing, Assistant District Attorney Ana Gonzalez described the public defender’s unavailability as an “abdication of their constitutional duty to indigent clients,” and said her office was able to handle its caseload.
“Who do you blame?” Dorfman asked Traun.
Traun said it wasn’t her place to say. Her main concern, she said, was that her defense attorneys were often faced with people in custody who did not have anyone to represent them, and they could no longer keep stepping in.
You mean that there are real human consequences to charging people for petty quality-of-life crimes, and clogging up courts with crimes that cost more to prosecute than they cost when they were carried out?
Who would have predicted that? Nobody could possibly have ever guessed.
Billions of dollars spent over decades by the “Be compassionate, do nothing” crowd created a vacuum that led to this. Perhaps they did not notice that public opinion was turning away from them because they were so busy deriding working San Franciscans who’ve grown increasingly disgusted with increasing public squalor and politically abandoned the nonprofit dominated progressives as being privileged? Perhaps because they were so busy losing the same ballot measure 7 times from Aggressive Panhandling in the early 90s to drug testing GA recipients last year?
True we need to make it more straightforward to send these people to prison instead of letting them get mired in an overly complex judicial process.
…because Prison is free and solves society’s ills…proven time and again by the absence of subsequent crime…
Jake T: which step(s) should be skipped?
You should also make sure to specify which step(s) you personally would want to be skipped if you were accused of a crime.
That’s not how the legal process works, and it’s a very good thing simpletons ^ aren’t in charge of it.
Funny. Jake here doesn’t want to say which step(s) he’d want to be skipped if he were accused of a crime.
What a joke. Under Adachi, the PD’s office was one of the most effective and efficient criminal defense groups. What has changed since his passing? Boudin (a DA in name only) chose not to prosecute our laws. Jenkins enforced the law, and Raju began this ridiculous charade where his PDs sought trials in every case — even those where doing so would not be in the best interest of the defendants — in an attempt to bog down the DA’s office, clog the court system, and get the accused out on technicalities. Now the PD’s are overloaded with unnecessary trial work, and keep overloading the good bar association as well. This is what happens when a PD office stops doing defense work and starts being a taxpayer-funded megaphone for progressive politics. Here’s hoping that some scrutiny by the Assessor, and some more whistleblowers from the PD’s office, will restore some sanity to this circus.
Campers,
There was a situation about 20 years ago when the Defender’s Office was overloaded as they are today.
Adachi went to the BOS for a supplement to hire more lawyers as I recall.
A series of Revenge as remedy periods saw those mayors cutting funding to the Public Defender while increasing cash and bodies for the DA.
When the BOS demurred Jeff brought in a tall and handsome and young and perfectly dressed for the role …
He brought in the guy who runs the books and watches over the system and he said that if the increase in Public Defender staff that he would hire lawyers from the local bar association who would cost much more.
Because, legally a defendant is required to be in front of a Judge in X amount of time and be in front of a jury in X about of time too.
Manu Raju’s people handle just over 20,000 cases in a slow year and the Sheriff has ??? I’m thinking 1,300 jail cells.
I’m amazed that Sheriff Miyamoto isn’t joining Public Defender Maju’s Cause.
go Niners !!
h.
There’s a certain karma to having this happen the same day a judge throws out another dumb case the DA shouldn’t be prosecuting… just saying – we know who to blame… prosecutors need to use their discretion cause some of these cases, apparently a hell of a lot of them, are garbage and can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt… just saying. Recall her.
Great reporting!