A judge found San Francisco’s public defender in contempt Tuesday in a dispute over limited staffing and caseloads.
San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Harry M. Dorfman found Public Defender Mano Raju had not followed the court’s lawful order to accept dozens of new criminal cases over January and February of this year.
Raju said his office is overwhelmed by the high volume of cases, and that it would be “unethical” to take on clients if their office could not provide due process.
“There is a huge amount of work to do in being an effective public defender, and we have an ethical obligation to make sure we can provide constitutionally effective representation to all of our clients,” Raju told KQED before the hearing. “If we continue to take every single case that comes in, that’s impossible.”
According to the public defender, there has been a 78% increase in active misdemeanor cases and a 56% increase in active felony cases since early 2019 — a period Raju says has also transformed what it takes to defend a single case.
“With body-worn cameras, surveillance technology, cell phone technology, each case is much, much more than the cases used to be,” Raju said. “There’s just a lot more materials to review in every single case.”
The crisis at the courts has escalated since May, when the public defender’s office declared itself unavailable one day a week due to excessive caseloads and understaffing.
The Bar Association of San Francisco previously provided privately-contracted attorneys to represent those defendants, but their caseloads also ballooned, and they have said they will no longer accept new appointments.
Raju’s office points to a recent study of public defender workloads, which concluded that excessive workloads violate court ethics and compromise the judicial system.
Using those standards, the office determined it needs 36 additional attorneys and dozens of support staff just to reach constitutional compliance.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has previously criticized the office’s stance, lashing out at the public defender’s “dereliction of duty” as a tactic to extract more funding from city leaders.
The court has also pushed back, suggesting the office has capacity to accept new cases — a position Raju disputes.
Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said that while the situation is unusual, it is not unheard of, and that public defender offices in other states have pursued similar legal standoffs when caseloads became unmanageable.
“It’s not unusual for public defenders to seek some kind of legal relief when they claim that their caseloads are too high,” Weisberg told KQED. “This is really, in a sense, a threat to go on strike.”
Similar standoffs have played out across California. Public defender offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, Alameda, Contra Costa and Sacramento counties have all declared some form of limited unavailability of new cases in recent years, according to Raju.
Kory DeClark, an attorney representing Raju and Gonzalez, said the office’s refusals reflect a principled effort to safeguard clients’ rights. He said that threatening the city’s top defense officials with contempt only moves the system further from a workable solution.
Dorfman said jail time would not be appropriate, and that he was still deciding whether Raju’s actions are one continuous contempt or separate instances of it. That decision will determine what fines will come as a result of the ruling.
Raju said his office will appeal the judge’s decision.
KQED’s Laura Klivans contributed to this report.
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