Vanguard Honors San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi for His Advocacy of Rights of Indigent Defendants

Each year, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi and his office host the Justice Summit in San Francisco, bringing together a combination of local leaders and national figures whose work in the legal community and for social justice gets highlighted through speeches and panel presentations.

This year marked the 50-year Anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, which guarantees the poor and disenfranchised the right to a vigorous public defense.  On March 18, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders.

This year’s celebration was bittersweet, as it marked the rights of the poor to equal defense in theory and unequal defense in practice.  Across the nation, public defenders and commentators celebrated the rights of the indigent to defense while lamenting the state of indigent defense as the result of benign neglect, budget deficits and just plain lack of prioritization.

As Jeff Adachi said in a speech this summer, “This crisis in indigent defense is one of the greatest ethical dilemmas in our legal system.  If there is to be liberty for all, then a basic contradiction exists if a poor person’s justice means being represented by a public defender who is handling 500 felony cases. “

“A few years back, I sat on the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Indigent Defense and I was able to see the quality of representation throughout the United States. I can tell you that even today, the poor quality of representation provided to people in the criminal courts remains a major problem.  In many states, public defenders do not have the power to refuse cases when their caseloads exceed what any lawyer could possibly handle.  Yet the system, including judges, prosecutors and defenders, often turns a blind eye to what amounts to everyday injustice,” he added.

Jeff Adachi, born in Sacramento and a graduate of McClatchy High School, is the only elected public defender in the state of California.

He attended Sacramento City College before transferring and receiving his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, then receiving his JD from the Hastings College of Law in 1985.

Mr. Adachi would begin as a deputy public defender at the San Francisco office and rise to the rank of chief attorney of the office.  In 2002, after briefly being forced out of office, he defeated Kimiko Burton-Cruz (daughter of State Senate Majority Leader John Burton) by a 55-45 margin.

The state of indigent defense has been widely lamented.  At the Justice Summit this year was Karen Houppert, author of Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice. In her conclusion, she quotes from the Reverend Michael Eric Dyson who, in 2011, addressed a crowd of three hundred public defenders and legal aid attorneys scattered in a hotel ballroom in DC.

He said, “The work that you do is vital and critical, because the principles of democracy rest on the ability of ordinary citizens to get justice in our legal system.”

Ms. Houppert also cited Attorney General Eric Holder’s 2009 speech: “Now, the obstacles to representing the indigent are well-known.   We know that resources for public defender programs lag far behind other justice system programs – they constitute about 3 percent of all criminal justice expenditures in our nation’s largest counties.”

“In many cases, contract attorneys and assigned lawyers often receive compensation that doesn’t even cover their overhead,” he said.   “We know that defenders in many jurisdictions carry huge caseloads that make it difficult for them to fulfill their legal and ethical responsibilities to their clients.  We hear of lawyers who cannot interview their clients properly, file appropriate motions, conduct fact investigations, or do many of the other things an attorney should be able to do as a matter of course. “

AG Holder added, “Finally, we know that there are numerous institutional challenges in public defense systems, like budget shortfalls.”

Jeff Adachi’s office, however, represents a beacon of hope for indigent defense – an office dedicated to the fight for indigent defense and justice for all.

Unlike many public defender’s offices, he has used his power and influence to nearly double the budget of his office while growing his staff by nearly 50 percent over the last decade for an office that serves roughly 25,000 people a year who otherwise cannot afford private attorneys.

In 2011, Mr. Adachi exposed to the public numerous instances of police misconduct inside San Francisco’s residential hotels.

According to a news account at the time, “Mr. Adachi released surveillance video taken during two drug busts at a residential hotel in the city’s South of Market neighborhood that he said proved police misconduct and perjury.

“His release of surveillance video, showing warrantless searches, brutality and theft by officers, resulted in an ongoing FBI investigation, the dissolution of a troubled undercover unit, and nearly a dozen problem police officers being taken off the streets.

“During the busts, which occurred Dec. 23 and Jan. 5, San Francisco police officers entered residential rooms on the fifth floor of the Henry Hotel at Sixth and Mission streets after receiving tips from informants about narcotics in the rooms, according to the public defender’s office.

“While the officers wrote in their police reports that they obtained consent before entering the rooms, the videos released Wednesday appear to show police entering the rooms without obtaining consent or having a warrant.”

“We’re talking about the violation of constitutional rights, and officers who lied about violating those rights,” Mr. Adachi said.

Mr. Adachi said that, in both cases, “the camera told a very different story than what the officer testified to.”

Jeff Adachi was also instrumental in pushing back against a proposed San Francisco version of the controversial “Stop and Frisk.”

In a July 5 op-ed, Mr.  Adachi argued, “The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.”

“The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a police officer may stop a citizen if there are ‘specific and articulable facts’ that would indicate that a crime is about to be committed,” Mr. Adachi wrote.  “But the court also held that a person cannot be frisked unless the officer has a reasonable belief that the person is carrying a weapon or illegal contraband.”

Mr. Adachi argues that “racial profiling does occur in San Francisco,” and notes that “despite its liberal leanings, a 2007 study by The Chronicle found  that African Americans in San Francisco are arrested for felonies at nearly twice the rate as in Sacramento and Fresno, and three times the rate in San Jose, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, and four times the rate in Oakland.

“While Mayor Lee says that the law would not be applied in a discriminatory fashion, data from stop-and-frisk cities bears out the discriminatory nature of the policy’s implementation,” Mr. Adachi argues. “The ACLU found that of the 4 million people stopped and questioned by the New York Police Department since 2002, most were black or Latino and 90 percent had committed no crime.

“Effective anticrime and antipoverty strategies, coupled with proven violence prevention and intervention strategies, is the better path to addressing violence. A program that targets the very people we want to protect isn’t the answer,” he concludes.

For his advocacy of the rights of indigent defendants and the rights of the accused, the Vanguard proudly honors San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi as its Elected Official of the Year.

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—David M. Greenwald reporting