22 FALL 2011

Five Candidates vie For TOP PROSECUTOR’S JOB

Erik Cummins

Sharmin Bock has been an as-sistant district attorney in the Ala- meda County district attorney’s office for twenty-two years. She boasts a 95 percent conviction rate for cases brought to trial and tried the first child sex-trafficking cases under California’s new hu-man trafficking law in 2006. She also created the county’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit and cowrote AB 90 to align state and federal trafficking laws.

Born in Iran and raised in San Francisco, Bock earned her law degree at Georgetown University Law Center in 1988. She spent summers at major San Francisco firms and the Environmental Enforcement Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. After law school, she clerked with U.S. District Court Judge D. Lowell Jensen. Instead of accepting a job at a big law firm, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office.

The position of San Francisco district attorney “is not a management job,” she said. “This is not a police job. It’s a job for a seasoned, experienced prosecutor. At the end of the day, it’s experience that informs the decision-making process. If [a prosecutor asks], ‘Do I charge this?’ you don’t want to say, ‘Let me ask somebody and get back to you.’”

If elected, Bock would try cases when her schedule permit- ted it. “You want to keep your finger on the pulse,” she said.

Bock opposes the death penalty and is leading efforts to ban it. In fact, she would take the money saved by not pursuing death penalty cases and use it for unsolved mur-der and rape cases.

San Francisco’s 2010 Proposition L, dubbed “sit-lie,” which banned sitting or lying on sidewalks, she argued, has not worked and has not provided long-term solutions. She also disagrees with sending drug offenders to prison. “They belong in a diversion program,” she said. “You need to look at the total person. We are misusing resources to even consider incarcerating people for drug convictions.”

San Francisco’s backlog of DNA testing needs to be addressed, and she wants to import her ideas on child sex trafficking to San Francisco.

As for prison realignment, she asked, “How can we turn this into a win-win situation and make reentry successful? We have to start before people arrive and work with the California Reentry Institute to make sure we have housing and jobs in place.”

Bock concluded, “San Francisco deserves a district attor-ney with the right kind of experience and a progressive veteran prosecutor.”

San Francisco’s justice system faces tremendous challenges in the coming years, as court budgets have been slashed, thousands of convicted criminals will return to local municipalities as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s realignment of the state prison system, and the overall economy remains shaky at best. This year, five candidates want to bring their visions to the San Francisco district attorney’s office to solve those problems and more. Here, we profile the candidates and their views and leave it to our members to decide in BASF’s plebiscite and the November 8, 2011, municipal election who best would lead as San Francisco’s top prosecutor.

THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 23

Five Candidates vie For TOP PROSECUTOR’S JOB

Erik Cummins

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William Fazio joined the district attorney’s race less than one week before the fil-ing deadline. After three pre-vious tries, the former pros-ecutor and long-time criminal defense attorney decided to run again after attending sev-eral debates and hearing from friends at the Hall of Justice.

“The reality is that the peo- ple commit crimes,” Fazio said. “We need someone to deal with that.”

Fazio earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at San Francisco State University. As an apprentice journeyman pressman, he attended the University of San Francisco School of Law at night and earned his law degree in 1973. He started his career at the San Francisco district attor-ney’s office in 1975 and opened his own criminal defense practice in 1995. As a result, he said, he brings institu-tional knowledge to the race.

Fazio did not support the sit-lie measure and said there are sufficient laws already covering those problems. He also favors decriminalizing all drugs, except those with inherent dangers, such as PCP and methamphetamines. Although he has prosecuted death penalty cases, he now believes that they do not provide closure to victims and would not employ a Special Circumstances Committee to advise him on something he would not seek.

Fazio said while prison realignment is more a concern for the sheriff ’s and probation departments, the district attorney should “reevaluate whom he’s sending to state prison.” Particularly in narcotics and alcohol cases, he said, “The DA should prevent people from getting into the system.”

Fazio would make “better use” of diversionary programs and design community courts that are “cheaper and more effective.” Individual prosecutors should adopt their local police stations and work out the problems that frequently crop up between police officers and district attorneys. Line prosecutors should also attend community meetings

convened by the police and get involved in local schools, he said. In addition, Fazio said he would better manage district attorney investigators to free up police officers to work their beats.

The challenge of the job is that there are “great young men and women in the office,” he said. “They need a leader. They need to be inspired. They want someone who has been there and done that—not unlike what [Public Defender] Jeff Adachi has done.”

While he has enjoyed his private practice, Fazio had “un-finished” business and decided for another run. “The time is right for me now.”

George Gascón grew up in a working class neighborhood in Havana, Cuba, and immi-grated to Los Angeles in 1967 at age thirteen. He learned Eng-lish and joined the U.S. Army. Afterwards, he took a job with the Los Angeles Police Depart-ment and rose to assistant chief.

As the office’s second-in-com-mand, he promoted reforms in the wake of the Rampart Division police misconduct scandal by revamping train-ing, teaching proper police procedures, and improving the CompStat crime data system. In the meantime, he earned a law degree from Western State University Col-lege of the Law.

In 2006, he was tapped as chief of police in Mesa, Arizo-na, where he successfully refuted Maricopa County Sher-iff Joe Arpaio’s erroneous charge that illegal immigrants were to blame for the rise in crime. He also achieved a 30 percent reduction in serious crime during his tenure.

In 2009, San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom appoint-ed Gascón as police chief and appointed him district at-torney two years later.

“I have moved public policy forward,” Gascón said. “You are not hiring a trial lawyer. You are hiring someone to lead and to manage the organization.”

24 FALL 2011

Gascón opposes the death penalty and has advocated against it. “We have a uniform message on the way we look at cases,” he said. “We are moving away from over-charging.” California’s criminal justice system is dysfunc-tional and is “overincarcerating people of color.”

Gascón supported the sit-lie measure and says that it has already helped by funneling people with mental health and drug problems into neighborhood courts. “It’s a tool we needed . . . to get people to services.”

Under Gascón, the office is centralizing criminal intake and seeking early resolutions by creating a risk assessment tool to objectively make offers. He also pointed to diver-sion programs for offenders with drug abuse and mental health issues. He suggests moving victim services into the community and he has taken strong positions on hate crimes and human trafficking by reaching out to vulner-able communities.

Gascón has increased training hours for prosecutors and staff, has formalized family leave and promotion policies, and is centralizing the department’s records. If elected in 2012, he would reach out to local technology companies to help improve the department’s outdated computer systems.

“I bring a long history of dealing with major problems and finding workable solutions,” Gascón concluded. “I have the experience of running large organizations and actually being able to deliver a product.”

David Onek has spent his ca-reer reforming the criminal jus-tice system, including stints as the founding executive director of the UC Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, with Mayor Newsom’s Office of Criminal Justice, and as a police commissioner, where he fought to upgrade San Francisco’s CompStat system.

Onek earned his law degree at Stanford University School of Law and began his career as a staff attorney with Legal Services for Children in San Fran-

cisco. He then became a senior program associate with the W. Haywood Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice Fair-ness and Equity. He was also a research associate at the National Council on Crime & Delinquency where he studied alternative approaches to incarceration.

“We have an overrepresentation of youth of color in the juvenile justice system,” Onek said. He helped Santa Cruz County develop a nationally recognized model juvenile justice system along with community organizations, service providers, and law enforce- ment stakeholders.

Citing high recidivism, Onek said, “The criminal justice system is completely broken. It has bankrupted the state.”

He strongly opposes the death penalty and notes the $4 billion spent prosecuting those cases since 1978. Rather than convening a Special Circumstance Committee, he would pursue life without parole in the most egregious cases and “not go through a sham process.”

Onek did not support the marijuana legalization measure Proposition 19 in 2010. The failed measure “would have led to a county-by-county hodge-podge [of regulations].” Instead, he supports coordinated state and national ef-forts. He also voted against the sit-lie measure because it is “a political solution to a public safety issue,” he said. “That is never a good idea. You need to look at the under-lying substance abuse and mental health issues.”

If elected, Onek would seek out his close ties at Stanford and UC Berkeley to help the city analyze its data. “DA’s offices are usually black holes of data,” Onek said. “We need to break it down by race and ethnicity and change policies and practices based on that data.”

Onek doesn’t think the district attorney should be in court. “You need to have a vision for the office, manage the office, and work collaboratively,” he said.

“As district attorney, you can effect change on a much grander scale than just individual cases,” Onek conclud-ed. “We need someone who has worked with all the com-munity groups and sees the big picture. I’ve been doing that for twenty years.”

THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 25

Vu Trinh was born in Saigon and immigrated to the United States in 1975. He graduated from UC Irvine in 1989 and earned his law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law. He clerked for the San Francisco public defender’s office and was admitted to the bar in 1992. He was a deputy Orange County public defender until 2000, when he opened his private defense practice. In 2009, he was appointed to the State Bar’s Crim-inal Law Advisory Commission.

The district attorney’s office “is ineffective,” Trinh said. “If you look at the ten-year statistics, they haven’t im-proved at all. They are not accurately identifying perpe-trators of violent crime.”

If elected he would place video cameras in public spaces to identify perpetrators and to use as evidence. “We are spend- ing more money on catching people running red lights than we are on finding murderers and rapists,” he said.

“They are not apprehending anybody,” he said. “I have been a victim of that and I know how it feels,” he said, referring to his sister Ann, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1991.

“If we can take care of violent crime, we will see a com-

plete change,” Trinh said. “The economy will improve greatly and people will want to come here.”

Trinh opposes the death penalty because he believes it violates the Eighth Amendment. “Besides, it’s a waste,” he said. “It’s not being implemented and people are just grandstanding.”

He would like California courts to adopt data systems used by the federal courts, in which attorneys, cases, and parties can be easily searched and their records reviewed. “You should have a transparent system,” he said.

As for California’s prison realignment, “If they want the DA to be a part of that, they should give more funding to the DA’s office, the public defender and the probation office,” he said, noting that corrections officials currently have that duty.

Trinh supports decriminalizing drugs and opposes sit-lie, which he feels is unjust and probably unconstitutional. “People don’t want to be homeless and be so hungry they can’t move,” he said. “And we want to criminalize that? It’s an absurdity.”

Trinh said voters should consider the experience of the candidates, noting that he has talked to thousands of de-fendants and witnesses. “I have actually dealt with real-life people from a defense perspective,” he said. “Do you think if you’ve never done a trial, you can manage a trial? That’s unbelievable hubris.”

Vote in BASF’s Plebiscite for San Francisco District AttorneyBalloting Ends September 23

Voting is currently underway for BASF’s plebiscite vote for San Francisco District Attorney. All attorney members as of August 31, 2011, are eligible to vote, so cast your ballot by Friday, September 23 so that BASF can endorse a candidate. Results of the plebiscite will be made public on Tuesday, September 27, 2011. If you have questions, visit www.sfbar.org/plebiscite.

basf plebiscite for san francisco District Attorney