A court crisis is brewing in San Francisco.
In the courtrooms of the San Francisco Hall of Justice, attorneys with the Public Defenders’ Office have been opting out of taking some new cases for the last few months.
The chief public defender says his attorneys are overwhelmed by the number of cases being filed by the District Attorney.
“We’re at a point where we’re selectively not being able to take all the cases. We’re still taking the vast majority, but we can’t take all the cases. Because if we did, we wouldn’t be able to provide effective representation to the clients that we currently have,” said Mano Raju, a San Francisco public defender.
Raju says for the last few years, his attorneys have been handling a deluge of new cases filed by District Attorney Brook Jenkins.
According to the Public Defender’s Office, caseloads have increased by 57% since 2021.
Raju says his office needs more funding to keep up.
“We are in conversations with city hall, the mayor’s office and with the board to try and resolve this as quickly as we can,” Raju said.
With attorneys with the Public Defender’s Office declaring themselves unavailable, lawyers from the San Francisco Bar Association have been tasked with picking up the slack.
But in an announcement last week by the Presiding Judge of The San Francisco Superior Court, and the Court’s Executive Officer, those private attorneys are also now at their limit and can’t accept any new cases either.
Now the court is warning they may have to start releasing defendants in some misdemeanor and felony cases writing, in a letter, “Consistent with constitutional mandates, the court will be required to release some defendants from pre-trial custody because they do not have an attorney to represent them.”
“That is a considerable public safety risk if the court is talking about either dismissing cases or releasing potentially violent criminals back out onto our streets. For me, the court has a job to do, and that is to appoint a public defender when they can’t afford a lawyer,” said Jenkins.
Jenkins says her office is prosecuting more cases, but she says it’s at about the same rate as before the pandemic.
She also points out her office did not get a budget increase this year either.
She notes her office has just over a dozen more attorneys than the public defender but also says only about 75% of the cases her office sends to the courts are handled by the public defender.
“I truly believe that this is a stunt, in order to bully the mayor’s office into giving them more funding, at the expense of public safety here in San Francisco,” Jenkins said.
There is a series of ongoing hearings about the issue. The next one is scheduled for Monday morning.