A San Francisco court will drop charges against dozens of people accused of DUIs, domestic violence, sexual battery and deadly driving Thursday morning, citing a July ruling that courts can no longer use pandemic-era backlogs to delay trials past their legal deadlines.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and the public defender’s office blamed the Superior Court for failing to try cases in a timely manner — thereby delaying defendants’ constitutional right to a speedy trial.
“They should’ve found a way to try these cases,” said Sujung Kim, a managing attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office. “It’s not that we or our clients are trying to evade responsibility; we were ready to go to trial. But we can’t do anything if the court won’t give us our day in trial.”
Jenkins accused the court of robbing victims and defendants of their rights.
“Regrettably, the system has now failed countless victims of crime who will not see justice done,” Jenkins said in an emailed statement.
The Superior Court has for years failed to try cases by their legal deadlines, pointing to a backlog caused by Covid. It just recently started dismissing some.
A spokesperson for the court declined to comment, citing the California Code of Judicial Ethics Canon, which states, “A judge shall not make any public comment about a pending or impending proceeding in any court.”
Court records show that 76 cases are up for dismissal Thursday, comprising 74 individual defendants. They include a driver accused of clipping a taxi, causing it to plow into a SoMa sidewalk and kill a mother and daughter visiting from Florida.
They also include a man accused of sexual battery in 2022, who was previously convicted of groping a mother’s breasts and genitals outside a Pacifica daycare center in 2014.
Roughly half the cases up for dismissal are DUIs, and around a fifth are related to domestic violence. One person was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
The vast majority of the cases were filed between the start of 2022 and April of this year.
Kim said she is unsure if more dismissals will be made due to the court ruling.
“Our office, the DA’s office and the court will go through our respective caseloads to see if there will be more,” Kim said. “So I can’t say for sure.”
The district attorney’s office confirmed that 70 cases will be dismissed with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled in San Francisco.
Jenkins argues that four of the cases had no speedy trial issues and should continue to be prosecuted; she plans to ask the court to rule on the matter Thursday. When asked for clarification by The Standard, Jenkins’ office did not specify the nature of the four cases.
The mass dismissal stems from an October 2021 case in which prosecutors accused a San Francisco woman, Lynette Mendoza, of drunk driving. She was handed a March 2023 court date, but Superior Court judges postponed her case six times throughout the following year, citing a backlog of cases brought on by the pandemic, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Mendoza sued, and after a series of appeals, an appellate court ruled in July that the Superior Court was violating her constitutional right to a speedy trial.
The ruling acknowledged that “potentially hundreds of other misdemeanor cases” past their trial deadlines could be dismissed.
In a separate case, San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju is suing the Superior Court, requesting it make more courtrooms available for criminal trials to address the backlog.
“The court’s decisions to continue cases past statutory deadlines for trial deprived defendants of their rights and also robbed victims of theirs,” Jenkins wrote in her statement.
Kim had a terse response for anybody upset about the dismissals.
“Lay that at the feet of the court,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated drug dealing charges were being dismissed. This was incorrect.