How We Researched San Francisco Judges

Stop Crime SF spent nine months researching the performance of 14 San Francisco judges whose terms end in January 2025.  We do this to make our judicial system more transparent and accountable.  And we hope to prod the Superior Court into greater transparency so the public can understand its judiciary, and achieve better “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Research on these judges included: 

·       A survey of trial attorneys who are close observers of San Francisco judges;

·       Research on appeals of court rulings;

·       Research on case history data on selected judicial rulings;

·       In-depth analysis of a limited sample of potentially problematic rulings;

·       An assessment of online and media coverage of the judges;

·       Additional intelligence gathering. 

Obtaining data on rulings by individual judges was a massive undertaking because that information is not accessible from the San Francisco Superior Court or the District Attorney’s Office. After we submitted a Public Records Act request in August 2023, over a period of three months we were able to obtain raw data from the DA on a narrow range of narcotics sales cases.  Our volunteers then made numerous trips to the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street over two months, where we requested more than 200 paper files of Superior Court cases from court clerks and photographed thousands of pages, to later review and process.  And then we ordered, paid for and waited weeks for transcripts of individual cases in some instances. Links to data and documents obtained in the public records act request will be shown here soon. Click here to see one example of the data we received. Note that there are two sheets in the example (go to the bottom to toggle between the two). The information in the sheet shows 213 cases of suspected drug dealing, much of it fentanyl and or methamphetamine.

Click here to see some of the emails between Stop Crime SF and the District Attorney’s office.

This is a start.  Our work is necessarily incomplete.  We hope to continue researching the performance of the approximately 40 other San Francisco judges in the coming years. 

 See below for some of the emails sent to us by the District Attorney’s data manager in response to our request.