SAN FRANCISCO SUPERIOR COURT is facing another backlog of criminal cases that could be dismissed, just over a year after dozens of cases had to be dismissed because they had gone past their constitutional limit for trials to start.
The court issued new guidance in late October in reaction to a decision in May by the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office to limit the number of cases it accepts, citing an increase in misdemeanor cases brought by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office as the reason.
The court’s Presiding Judge Rochelle East and court executive officer Brandon Riley said in a statement that the court would be forced to release some defendants from pretrial custody and might ultimately have to dismiss cases that go beyond their statutory deadline to start a trial.
That position drew a blistering response from Jenkins, who called the court’s move in a recent phone interview “a complete sign of negligence.” She said the decision would endanger San Franciscans and called it “sickening” if any clients of the Public Defender’s Office were released.
Jenkins characterized the maneuver in turns as an illegal strike and a “temper tantrum” by Public Defender Mano Raju in an attempt to get more money for his budget, and said the Public Defender’s Office was using an intentional strategy to overwhelm the court by opting never to take any pretrial diversion offers. She said risking a trial was “legal malpractice” when diversion programs were available that would completely wipe charges from a criminal record.
Raju called that assertion “completely wrong.” He said the Public Defender’s Office currently had about 20% of its cases in pretrial diversion and said it routinely accepts pretrial diversion offers when available by statute and has requested diversion in many cases that aren’t automatically eligible, only to have prosecutors object.
A spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, Randy Quezada, later clarified that Jenkins’ statement might have been “hyperbolic,” but said it was “absurd” that more of the roughly 2,300 defendants that he said are currently eligible for pretrial diversion wouldn’t take advantage of it if they could have their case wiped off their record with little required of them.
Numbers telling the story
The Superior Court’s statement called the influx of new cases “unprecedented.” Data from the District Attorney’s Office shows that new misdemeanor cases spiked from about 2,300 in both 2022 and 2023 to over 4,200 in 2024. Through mid-November this year, there were nearly 3,700 new cases filed.
A prosecutor with the District Attorney’s Office said about 70% of pending cases are automatically eligible for diversion options that had potential requirements as simple as showing up to court for an initial hearing, or not being arrested for as little as a month, in order to have “diversion deemed,” a legal term for when a judge decides that a defendant has fulfilled their pretrial diversion requirements without further action.
According to data from the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project, a nonprofit organization supported by the Bar Association of San Francisco that partners with the court to manage cases that enter pretrial diversion, the number of defendants entering diversion roughly kept pace through the first half of 2025 compared to 2024, before a drop-off in the third quarter of this year.
But the numbers, which do not include “diversion deemed” cases, are small compared to the backlog facing the court.
There was a total of 132 defendants who agreed to pretrial diversion programs from January 2024 through September that year, compared to 117 during the same time period in 2025, a decline of about 11%.
As of mid-November of this year, there were over 3,600 misdemeanor cases pending. The misdemeanor clearance rate, which had bounced back and forth from negative to positive over recent years, dropped into negative rates in April 2024 and has remained behind the rate of new filings ever since. Positive clearance rates mean the court is removing more cases from its docket than are being filed, while negative rates mean there are more cases being filed per month than are being adjudicated.
The court heard 12 misdemeanor trials in October and 14 in September. The highest number it has held since 2019 is 20, according to the Superior Court’s data dashboard.
Jenkins and her team believe the Public Defender’s Office should be working more intentionally to close cases that have easy or no requirements as part of their diversion, and asserts that the thousands of cases that are automatically eligible to have a defendant’s charges completely wiped off their record are what is clogging up the courts.
Beyond capacity issues, Raju said there were plenty of reasons why the Public Defender’s Office might not accept diversion offers that might appear easy to fulfil to another party. Sometimes even fulfilling requirements to check in with the court can be difficult for defendants to follow depending on their living situations, such as not having reliable access to a phone or permanent address, or having mental health issues that might interfere with their compliance.
Data from the District Attorney’s Office shows that successful pretrial diversion rates have plummeted in recent years, reaching a high of about 72% in both 2021 and 2022 before dropping to 64% in 2024 and to 58% in 2025.
Raju also said there could be consequences for those facing other civil cases, such as those involving child custody, even if there was no criminal conviction as part of a diversion program. For example, if someone was offered anger management classes as part of a pretrial diversion, they might decline in favor of fighting the charges at trial if they think they could win.
On that note, Raju pointed to the low conviction rate in misdemeanor trials by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office as evidence that too many cases that should not be tried are making their way to courtrooms.
Over the past 12 months, the District Attorney’s Office has a conviction rate in misdemeanor trials of about 50%. About 32% of those trials have resulted in not guilty verdicts and about 18% have resulted in hung juries or mistrials, according to the Superior Court’s data dashboard.
The conviction rate was about 57% from 2015-2025 in such trials but has been about 41% over the past three years.
The controversy comes just over a year after San Francisco Superior Court officials and the district attorney traded blame over the dismissal of 70 misdemeanor cases that had gone past their deadline to have trials.
Misdemeanor cases must be heard within 45 days if a defendant exercises their right to a speedy trial, and felony cases must be heard within 60 days.
Another assertion Jenkins made — that Raju said was untrue — was that the Public Defender’s Office assigns two attorneys to every felony trial. Raju said there are felony trials only worked by one defense attorney and said when there are two, it is often for training purposes.
The two also traded statistics about whose budget was more strained and who had more work to do. Jenkins said all city departments have the same constraints and have to work with what the mayor’s office budgets for them.
She said the Public Defender’s Office had a constitutional obligation to work within its means and called for it to make better management decisions, pointing out that her office has 140 attorneys to manage its own workload, which she contended was more than the Public Defender’s Office, which has 120 attorneys.
While the District Attorney’s Office works on every case that enters the system, the Public Defender’s Office only represents clients who cannot afford a lawyer. Jenkins said that number was 75% of the cases. Raju said the number was closer to 80%. He also pointed out that the Public Defender’s Office handled immigration cases that the District Attorney’s Office does not.
He also pointed to the district attorney’s larger budget of $94 million compared to $57 million for the public defender, and to the budgets of the San Francisco Police Department and Sheriff’s Office, which are involved in investigations for the prosecution and totaled about $1.1 billion this budget year.
Guidance from the American Bar Association recommends doing exactly what the Public Defender’s Office did when attorneys are facing a workload that could start to diminish the quality of the defense they provide in cases they do accept.
If attorneys feel they are beyond their limit, the ABA advises in its “standards for providing defense services” that defense attorneys and organizations “must take such steps as may be appropriate to reduce their pending or projected caseloads, including the refusal of further appointments. Courts should not require individuals or programs to accept caseloads that will lead to the furnishing of representation lacking in quality or to the breach of professional obligations.”
Workload and funding tensions
Raju said cases had become more complex in recent years as body cameras and smartphones provided more information for attorneys to investigate.
He called on the District Attorney’s Office to bring fewer “quality of life” cases that involved drugs or homelessness and said the court should look at downgrading some felonies to misdemeanors and making more cases eligible for pretrial diversion.
Jenkins called on the court to continue appointing the Public Defender’s Office cases and said the court was allowing the defense to have a “tactical advantage.”
She pointed out that cases were still below the levels being prosecuted before 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused backups in courts nationwide, resulting in a drop in prosecutions. She said there were about 9,000 cases prosecuted in 2019, while there were about 8,000 in 2024 and about 6,400 so far in 2025.
Raju didn’t directly address what was different this time around but said he had consistently been asking for more funding in his budget since he became the public defender in 2019. He said he was trying to prevent burnout and hoped the Board of Supervisors would work with the mayor to get his office more money.