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A law firm trying to give crime victims a seat in the courtroom and a voice in the legal system just got California\u2019s Supreme Court to listen. Now, the state\u2019s highest court wants to hear from a prosecutor who calls himself a champion for crime victims, after one attorney\u2019s fight helped bring a public record to light that says otherwise.<\/p>\n
By Susan Bassi and Fred Johnson\u00a0<\/p>\n
For sixteen years, one line has been repeated at nearly every major press conference in the county. A defendant is sentenced. Cameras gather outside the courthouse. A prosecutor steps to the microphones, thanks the victims for their courage, and promises they\u2019ll always come first.<\/p>\n
Say it enough times, and it starts to sound like fact instead of a claim.<\/p>\n
Step away from the podium, and the record tells a messier story.<\/p>\n
THE RECORD AWAY FROM THE PODIUM<\/p>\n
The prosecutor is Jeffrey Francis Rosen, who has run the Santa Clara County District Attorney\u2019s Office since 2010. Longer than many of the county\u2019s crime victims have been alive.<\/p>\n
At his February State of the Office address, he stood before county supervisors and asked a blunt question.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow much is a domestic violence victim\u2019s life worth in Santa Clara County?\u201d \u2014 Jeff Rosen, February 2026<\/p>\n
He warned that cuts<\/a> would mean less safety, and that people might die.<\/p>\n But beyond Rosen\u2019s press releases and political theatrics, a different picture forms: court filings, lawsuits, restitution orders, election results, and social media posts. The clearest account of how DA Rosen actually treats crime victims comes from someone who used to work for him.<\/p>\n THE PROSECUTOR WHO SAID IT FROM INSIDE<\/p>\n Daniel Chung<\/a> spent years as a deputy district attorney in Rosen\u2019s own violent felonies unit, prosecuting domestic violence cases.<\/p>\n In February 2021, he published an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News about the surge in pandemic-era violence, calling for a justice system that protected victims while addressing crime\u2019s roots. He wrote it as a private citizen and didn\u2019t name Rosen or the office.<\/p>\n Daniel Chung (left) and James McManis (right), March 2026 San Jose, California. Photo by Susan Bassi\u00a0<\/p>\n According to a later lawsuit, Rosen read the op- ed the night it ran, was furious, and had Chung reassigned out of the Violent Felonies Unit within hours.<\/p>\n Chung kept speaking publicly about problems he said he saw inside the office, including claims that evidence went undisclosed and campaign money was used improperly.<\/p>\n Rosen placed him on leave, then fired him<\/a>. A personnel board ordered him reinstated. Rosen\u2019s office kept him from working anyway, while still paying<\/a> his salary.<\/p>\n Chung ran against Rosen for the top law enforcement job twice and lost both times, but the margins tell their own story. This year, in a head-to-head race, he won close to 40 percent of the vote against a two-decade incumbent.<\/p>\n \u201cEven 40% of the community is supportive of meaningful change.\u201d No single claim proves a pattern. Together, they read like an inside account of the same gap crime victims outside the office have described for years: a district attorney whose promises don\u2019t survive\u00a0 his own prosecutorial decisions.<\/p>\n OUTSIDE HIS OWN CIRCLE<\/p>\n Some of the sharpest accounts of that gap come from ordinary people who ran into Rosen\u2019s office on the worst day of their lives.<\/p>\n Paul Gackle,<\/a> a former San Jose Mercury News sports reporter covering the San Jose Sharks, was stabbed 14 times in a 2017 attack. He survived the attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n Vanguard reporting<\/a> in 2023 found Rosen\u2019s office had offered Gackle\u2019s attacker a plea deal that freed her nine days before she attacked him, then let more than a year pass before that became public.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gackle said Rosen\u2019s Victim Services Unit<\/a>, then led by director Kasey Halcon<\/a>, took more than three years to get him the state compensation he was owed. He has also said the San Jose Mercury News, that has endorsed and provided favorable reporting on Rosen\u2019s office dating back to 2010, fired Gackle after he pushed editors to report more fully on Rosen\u2019s handling of survivors of violent crimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The newspaper said Gackle\u2019s firing was related to the PTSD he exhibited after surviving the violent crime that left him with 14 scars.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n After Gackle was fired, Mercury News reporter Robert Salonga and longtime newspaper editor Bert Robinson, obtained a two- year restraining order<\/a> against Gackle, preventing him from attending Rosen\u2019s press conferences during the 2022 election.\u00a0<\/p>\n The restraining order was pursued after Gackle had become a vocal critic of Rosen\u2019s handling of the county\u2019s crime victims, and how Salonga had reported on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The pattern isn\u2019t limited to one case.<\/p>\n In 2014, prosecutors declined to charge 49ers lineman Ray McDonald<\/a> after his fianc\u00e9e was found with visible injuries. The district attorney\u2019s office, who assigned Cindy Hendrickson to the case, cited the victim\u2019s limited cooperation to justify not pursuing the high profile domestic violence case.\u00a0<\/p>\n The following year, a grand jury indicted McDonald on a rape charge<\/a> from a separate incident involving a different woman and charged a teammate with sexual battery in the same case. The sexual violence case was rolled up with domestic violence allegation involving two different women. Rosen took both cases as one to the grand jury. Despite a grand jury indictment, both cases disappeared from Rosen\u2019s prosecution list shortly thereafter.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time, critics noted that local police worked secondary security jobs at the 49ers\u2019 stadium, and argued the scrutiny applied to victims in these cases exceeded the scrutiny applied to the players.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2018, felony domestic violence charges against a different 49ers player, Reuben Foster, were dismissed<\/a> after a judge found Rosen\u2019s office hadn\u2019t provided the evidence needed for trial.\u00a0<\/p>\n While repeatedly failing to handle evidence in some cases, others see excessive delays.\u00a0<\/p>\n Delay isn\u2019t neutral.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury reports<\/a>, \u201cJustice Delayed: Why Does It Take So Long to Resolve Felonies in Santa Clara County?\u201d in 2017 and a follow-up continuity report the next year, found the county resolved felony cases slower than nearly every other county in the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n The reports focused mainly on the cost to defendants sitting in jail and to taxpayers footing the bill, but the same delay cuts against victims too: cases that drag on for years leave survivors waiting, testifying, and re-living what happened long after it should have been resolved.<\/p>\n Rosen\u2019s ties to a different set of crime victims raised separate questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n A 2023 Vanguard investigation examined WomenSV<\/a>, a Los Altos nonprofit that says it serves wealthy Silicon Valley households dealing with domestic abuse.\u00a0<\/p>\n One published critic alleged Rosen used the nonprofit\u2019s wealthier clients as political validators, while more ordinary victims described a different experience. It\u2019s an unproven claim, but the same shape as everything else here: treatment that depended on how useful a victim\u2019s story was, not on what they survived.<\/p>\n A LAW FIRM VICTIMS KEEP FINDING<\/p>\n One law firm<\/a> keeps showing up on the other side of that gap.<\/p>\n Attorney James McManis represented Chung\u2019s lawsuit against the county, calling it hard to imagine a clearer case of retaliation for disliked speech.<\/p>\n This year, through attorney<\/a> Miriam Pieters, the firm took a new client: the family of a woman murdered decades ago, fighting to keep her killer\u2019s sentence from being quietly reduced through a process neither side wanted challenged.<\/p>\n In early July, McManis and Pieters petitioned<\/a> the California Supreme Court on two questions. Was a state sentencing law ever meant to apply to death sentences? Do crime victims have any right to be heard once prosecutors and defense stop disagreeing?\u00a0<\/p>\n A month later, the court ordered Rosen\u2019s office to answer both in writing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a small filing in a long fight, but the clearest legal argument yet for what Chung had already been saying from inside the building: Santa Clara County\u2019s crime victims were promised a voice they don\u2019t have.<\/p>\n THE NUMBERS DON\u2019T MATCH THE SPEECHES<\/p>\n Rosen\u2019s warnings about budget cuts and victim safety keep colliding with his own office\u2019s numbers.<\/p>\n Two years before his February speech, San Jos\u00e9 Spotlight reported<\/a> the office was struggling to manage a 142 percent rise in family violence cases over five years.\u00a0<\/p>\n This year Rosen told supervisors his office needed protection from budget cuts, even as county records showed his budget had grown to $185 million, up from $177 million, while his own staffing projections fell.<\/p>\n An office that says it lacks staff to protect domestic violence victims is the same office that, for years, has paid a trained domestic violence prosecutor to not work, as previously reported.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n A CASE THE OFFICE DIDN\u2019T WANT<\/p>\n Rosen sailed into his 2018 re-election on the national spotlight cast by his office\u2019s prosecution of Brock Turner. Rosen\u2019s office had convicted Turner in 2016, and though Rosen said publicly he was outraged by the light sentence Judge Aaron Persky handed down, the case became a #MeToo flashpoint largely because of Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, who led the campaign to recall Persky, helped publicize the viral victim impact statement written by Chanel Miller, then known only as Emily Doe.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rosen cast himself as a champion for crime victims throughout the saga. Voters returned him to office without opposition in June 2018, the same day Persky was recalled.<\/p>\n Seven months later, Renee Doe, a woman in San Martin, said she was raped by a homeless man she had tried to help.<\/p>\n Initially, prosecutors first refused to file charges, calling the case too difficult, and released the suspect.\u00a0<\/p>\n He disappeared for weeks. Only after public attention did prosecutors reverse course; by then, deputies needed a manhunt to find a man<\/a> they\u2019d already had in custody once.\u00a0<\/p>\n Renee has said Rosen\u2019s office struggled with mental health issues at the center of the case, and that Rosen\u2019s Victim Services Unit, then led by director Kasey Halcon, offered her only a $250 cash card and told her there was little else the office could do to help.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one case, but it follows the same shape as everything else here: a victim whose voice mattered only once the story became too public to ignore.<\/p>\n WHAT $66,000 MEANS TO CHILD SEX ABUSE VICTIMS\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a more recent example, and it comes down to numbers.<\/p>\n In March, a jury convicted Shannon O\u2019Connor, known publicly as the \u201cLos Gatos Party Mom,\u201d<\/a> on dozens of felony and misdemeanor charges for hosting alcohol- and sex-fueled gatherings for teenagers over roughly two years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Restitution Order in Los Gatos Party Mom case issued August 6, 2026.<\/p>\n Sentenced in late May to more than 30 years, she was ordered in August to pay four teenage victims a combined total of just over $66,000, plus a smaller reimbursement to the state\u2019s crime victim compensation fund. Some victims told this news outlet the process took too long, and the payout fell short of what they expected from a prosecutor who spoke at a press conference about justice and support for crime victims.\u00a0<\/p>\n Compare that to a case Rosen used often in his own political messaging before the June primary: a former San Jose councilman, Omar Torres,<\/a> convicted of molesting a relative decade earlier, sentenced to 18 years and ordered to pay his victim $780,000. A figure Rosen\u2019s office cited again and again before voters went to the polls.<\/p>\n Two crimes against children, two sets of victims, wildly different outcomes for what the county\u2019s justice system decided their suffering was worth. One case happened to arrive with a camera crew and an election on the calendar.<\/p>\n PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT AND PUBLIC SAFETY<\/p>\n California\u2019s Racial Justice Act<\/a> exists for a real reason. Trials across the state, including old ones, sometimes happened inside a system shaped by racial bias, in who got charged, how juries were picked, and what prosecutors said in court.<\/p>\n The law lets a defendant raise a \u201ccolorable\u201d claim, one serious enough a court can\u2019t wave it away, and reopen the case if it holds up. That\u2019s a reasonable answer to a real problem: a national report released last month found more than 600 death sentences nationwide overturned, or leading to exoneration, because of prosecutorial misconduct.<\/p>\n But the same rule that frees the wrongly convicted can also, quietly, reopen cases that were never in doubt, and not always for the people it was written to protect.<\/p>\n Consider Judge Stuart Scott who spent nearly a decade hearing family law and civil domestic violence cases in Santa Clara County. Stuart Scott spent two decades as a county prosecutor, working under Jeff Rosen\u2019s supervision, before winning an uncontested judgeship race.\u00a0<\/p>\n The state\u2019s Commission on Judicial Performance has since publicly admonished him for violating judicial ethics rules related to improper conduct involving a female government attorney. As a prosecutor, appeals courts found some of his trial arguments unsupported by the evidence, and a federal appeals court overturned convictions tied to his conduct. The state bar shows no public discipline resulting from his misconduct.\u00a0<\/p>\n Judge Stuart Scott decided custody battles, restraining orders, and family court outcomes across the county for years, before recently moving back into criminal assignments.\u00a0<\/p>\n Every domestic violence victim whose case passed through his courtroom did so before a judge the state had already found violated basic fairness rules. If a colorable claim can unwind a death verdict three decades later, it\u2019s hard to say why the same standard would stop there.<\/p>\n DA Rosen press conference set up in 2018 outside the Hall of Justice. Photo by Susan Bassi<\/p>\n SIXTEEN YEARS, FORTY PERCENT<\/p>\n For sixteen years, Rosen has stood before cameras describing himself as the person protecting survivors. That\u2019s hard to square with the record: a prosecutor fired for saying victims deserved more, a rape case the office refused to file at first, a restitution order worth a fraction of a comparable case, a former prosecutor turned family court judge, disciplined more than once, still shaping outcomes for the domestic violence survivors Rosen says he fights for in the same county.<\/p>\n This spring, close to 40 percent of Santa Clara County voters told Rosen they were done taking his word for it. The Supreme Court\u2019s letter is a smaller signal pointing the same direction: for the first time in years, someone above the district attorney\u2019s office is making him answer, in writing, for the gap between what he says at the podium and what his record shows.<\/p>\n McManis, Pieters, and the family they represent didn\u2019t create that gap. Neither did Chung. They inherited it, and now they\u2019re asking, in a courtroom instead of a press conference, whether Santa Clara County\u2019s crime victims will finally<\/a> get the voice Jeff Rosen has been promising them for sixteen years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Categories: Breaking News<\/a> Everyday Injustice<\/a> Tags: California Supreme Court<\/a> Crime Victims\u2019 Rights<\/a> Criminal Justice<\/a> Jeff Rosen<\/a> Prosecutorial Accountability<\/a> Santa Clara County District Attorney<\/a> Sentencing Proceedings<\/a> Victims\u2019 Rights<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A law firm trying to give crime victims a seat in the courtroom and a voice in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-428798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-21-1024x742.webp\")
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\u2014 Daniel Chung, June 2026<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-21-1024x870.webp\")
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