Boudin: Doing what we elected him to do

Photo: Lea Suziki

Letter to the editor in today's SF Chronicle:

Regarding “Progressive prosecutor quits, joins D.A. recall” (Bay Area, Oct. 24): 

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is doing what the people elected him to do.

Violent crime is down. Nonviolent offenders get treatment, and if it doesn’t succeed, the case goes back for trial. Most are heavily supervised by pre-trial services, collaborative courts and the Sheriff’s Department. The treatment often works and people go on to lead productive lives.

Some prosecutors leave because they think jailing is the answer to crime prevention, others because the job is hard and stressful. Former prosecutor Brooke Jenkins has an ax to grind because a member of her family is unfortunately a victim of violent crime. I wouldn’t expect her to be impartial, victims never are, but her solution of charging a gang enhancement in the case is no solution at all.

In the good old days, police testified in gang cases that the defendant was in a gang because his friends said he was. Not surprisingly they never could remember who those friends were and when they talked to them. My experience as an attorney defending young men was that it was not often that they shot the breeze with the police and fingered their friends.

Ms. Jenkins also complained that Mr. Boudin let her try a case that everyone except her believed, correctly, that she could not win. He then made an an executive decision in the case, which bosses do sometimes. That defendant will spend the rest of his life locked in Napa State Hospital.

I have never experienced a District Attorney’s Office more responsive to victims than the current one. Many of my cases have had offers that would have been accepted in prior years rejected because of input from the victim.

Change is hard and bumps in the road are to be expected. We tried locking everyone up, and drugs were still sold and cars broken into.

David B. Harrison

San Francisco