Some pre-trial defendants will be released from SF jails merely because there aren’t enough lawyers for their cases, and now the SF Controller will audit the situation, as DA Brooke Jenkins has brought a wave of misdemeanor prosecutions.
We’ve known for months there’s been an untenable status quo, where a deluge of misdemeanor cases from the ongoing fentanyl and blight crackdowns have strained the Public Defender’s Office’s ability to take new cases. This seems to have come to a boil this week, as KTVU reported Tuesday that the SF Superior Court declared it would release some defendants who have not yet stood trial. SF Public Defender Mano Raju blamed this on the SF District Attorney’s Office bringing too many “frivolous and unsubstantiated cases.”
DA Brooke Jenkins took issue with that assessment, as well as the decision to release defendants who had not yet stood trial. Jenkins blasted the decision, telling KQED that “What is new is that the court has become complicit in this by now stating that they are going to release potentially dangerous and violent felons back into the community because of what’s happening.”
KQED ran the numbers, though, and found that Jenkins’s office filed 8,000 cases in 2024, compared to some 5,600 in the last full year of the Chesa Boudin administration. So yes, definitely more criminal cases are being filed, though as KQED points out, “the rate of convictions and diversions remains proportionately similar” under both DAs.
While the DA and Public Defender might argue the merits of this surge in cases, now a third party is stepping in. Mission Local reports that the SF Controller’s Office is stepping in to audit the increase of criminal cases, as the SF Superior Court complains they are “facing an unprecedented number of misdemeanor cases.”
The San Francisco Bar Association has been taking on cases that the Public Defender’s Office has lacked the bandwidth to take. But now they too said this week that they are too overwhelmed to take on any more new cases.
Mayor Lurie’s office reportedly asked for the SF Controller audit in August, and it is currently in progress.
Mission Local adds that arrestees have been kept in jail for longer periods because there are not enough attorneys to represent them. They note the concerning circumstance that “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.”
So some of those defendants will be able to go free until their trial dates. Though per Mission Local, that arrangement may not be permanent, as both the DA’s Office and Public Defender’s Office have a joint Monday meeting with a judge to “discuss the spiraling problem of the lawyer shortage.”
Image: Lynn F via Yelp