SAN JOSE — Daniel Chung, a benched prosecutor making a second electoral attempt to unseat his boss — four-term Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen — gathered some of the DA’s most ardent critics Wednesday to stage a rally with the June primary election on the horizon.
Chung’s campaign is rooted in trying to make the race a referendum on Rosen, who is backed by most of the county’s law enforcement and political leadership and holds a significant fundraising advantage.
At the rally, Chung and his allies seized on last week’s Superior Court ruling disqualifying Rosen’s office from retrying five pro-Palestine activists for felony vandalism in a Stanford University office takeover two years ago, after a judge concluded Rosen compromised himself by improperly referencing the case in his fundraising for re-election. They said the decision-making illustrated by the Stanford prosecution conflicted with Rosen’s recent efforts to call out wasteful county spending to spare his office from what he calls devastating proposed staffing cuts.
“At a time when the county is bleeding billions of dollars, raising our sales taxes through Measure A and is about to cut dozens and dozens of jobs here in Santa Clara County, it is unconscionable, the priorities of DA Rosen and what is going on in that office,” Chung said Wednesday. “The complete implosion of the Stanford felony prosecution is a great example of the lack of ethics and waste going on in the DA’s office.”
“It shows that ethics have been severely compromised,” he said. “It shows that we are willing to burn through tens of millions of dollars on politically motivated prosecutions — and prosecutions that ultimately don’t succeed.”
In response to an inquiry from the Bay Area News Group, Rosen did not address the rally, and instead said in a statement that he was attending a peace officers memorial held Wednesday at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
“Today, my focus is solely on the officers who have lost their lives protecting us,” Rosen said. “They, their fellow officers, and their families, deserve that respect – and so much more.”
The San Jose Police Officers’ Association also sent out a statement after the rally supporting Rosen: “It’s crazy to think anyone other than Jeff Rosen has the experience, temperament and knowledge to be district attorney. Public safety is DA Rosen’s priority, not conspiracy theories spouted by the peanut gallery.”
Sean Allen, president of the San Jose-Silicon Valley chapter of the NAACP, spoke at the rally and said the Stanford decision is one reason his organization is calling for an independent review of charging decisions by Rosen’s office, including identifying any potential religious and racial disparities in sentencing and plea offers.
The Stanford recusal order “is a judicial finding by a sitting judge in this county that the elected district attorney’s decisions in a high profile case were influenced by personal bias and a failure to remain objective,” Allen said. “When the judiciary itself finds a lack of objective in one case, the community has a responsibility to ask whether the same lack of objectivity affects other decisions across his office.”
Another familiar critic of Rosen, Tony LoBue, also attended the rally. He counts himself among the families aggrieved by Rosen’s landmark policy decision two years ago to resentence about a dozen condemned men to life-without-parole terms. Rosen has previously explained that the move was spurred by a change in philosophy inspired by historical racial injustice and a state moratorium regarding capital punishment.
LoBue, whose older sister Rosellina was brutally stabbed to death in 1987 by Erik Chatman, fiercely objected to the resentencing, and last month, Chatman was further resentenced to a 25-year prison term and immediate parole eligibility, to head off a prospective retrial. The DA’s office determined that an active Racial Justice Act claim about conduct in Chatman’s original trial had a good chance of succeeding.
Decades of feeling justice from Chatman’s death sentence, LoBue said, evaporated after Rosen’s actions.
“He is trying to put these people back on the streets with your children and mine, and that’s wrong,” LoBue said. “He’s supposed to be fighting for the victim’s rights.”
There is no love lost between the two candidates. Chung was once an up-and-coming prosecutor in Rosen’s office, and the public view of that changed after Chung wrote an opinion piece published in The Mercury News criticizing criminal justice reforms. But he did not run it by his chain of command, and compounded with other internal disputes, Rosen moved to fire Chung.
What ensued has been a years-long legal and political clash — Chung also ran for the DA’s office in 2022, making a surprise second-place finish in a three-candidate race, though Rosen won outright in the primary. So far, it has entailed free-speech litigation against Rosen, which was dismissed in Rosen’s favor but is under appeal, and arbitration hearings that ended in favor of Chung by reversing two separate termination attempts.
As it stands, Chung is still technically employed by Rosen, but the DA has prohibited him from working in the office, citing his temperament and judgment, telling this news organization in March, “It would be dangerous to the public to give him the enormous power to prosecute crimes.”
Conversely, Chung has used his fully paid time off to build his second campaign and has repeatedly cited his employment status to further criticize his boss: “He is paying prosecutors not to work.”