It is hard to believe that a month has gone by since I started working at the CJC. My decision to staff the court myself was a product of necessity, since I just don’t have the staffing for this court. The Mayor’s office had originally promised to fund the court with two public defenders, and when the court opened, they said they could not fund the court due to the budget deficit. Our staff now is down by eight and our felony and serious case load is still steadily rising.
“There’s a new Sheriff at the CJC.” Well, actually, not really. Our regular judge is out of town on vacation, and we have a substitute judge at the CJC for a few weeks. At our first morning meeting with the substitute judge, the first thing he wanted to know is what problems we were having […]
Efforts currently coordinated by the Safe Communities Reentry Council and the San Francisco Reentry Council will be reorganized under the single umbrella of the new formalized Reentry Council and its Subcommittees. The first meeting of the New Reentry Council has been slated for Tuesday June 16.
The Clean Slate Program 2007-2008 evaluation examines how efficiently Clean Slate delivers services and the impacts that Clean Slate services have on clients’ lives. The Clean Slate Program extends legal advocacy beyond an arrest or disposition by the court so that clients may avail themselves of opportunities to “clean up” their criminal records, even decades after their criminal case is closed.
The second week of the new court has been more of the same. Each day, about five or six cases are scheduled to be heard in court, and most of the cases end up being discharged simply because they aren’t bona fide cases. What I mean by this that they are cases that otherwise would […]
You may have heard or read that the new Community “Justice” Center (CJC) opened last week. Based on Brooklyn’s Red Hook Community Justice Center, the CJC is supposed to solve neighborhood problems like drugs, crime, prostitution and theft. The court is a full-fledged court, except that it is situated in the Tenderloin and deals with misdemeanor and […]
San Francisco, CA – A San Francisco man, who was strip-searched and misidentified by police, was acquitted of drug sales in 70 minutes after his deputy public defender exposed the prosecution’s case as devoid of evidence of illegal activity. “The scary thing about this case is that what happened to my client could have happened […]
The need for a well-resourced and comprehensive public defense system was made evident in a study released yesterday by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) indicating that African Americans and Hispanics are over-represented in the criminal justice system and more likely to require a public defender than their Caucasian counterparts.
San Francisco, CA – Demetrius Hill, 20, was acquitted yesterday afternoon of first degree murder in connection with the May 3, 2008 shooting death of Ajason Black, 32, in the parking lot of the Buchanan YMCA on Geary Boulevard. Deputy Public Defender Mark Iverson, who represented Hill, successfully argued at trial that Hill had no […]
San Francisco, CA – San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi on Thursday promised cooperation with Supervisor Sean Elsbernd’s call for an audit of the public defender’s office, but accused Elsbernd of engaging in petty retaliatory politics that are wasting valuable resources. “I think that this unnecessary audit will result in an incredible waste of staff […]
