Public defender opens challenge to DA
Sajid Khan pledges reforms in his campaign to unseat Jeff Rosen, who ran unopposed in past two reelections
Sajid Khan, a Santa Clara County public defender, is running to become the South Bay’s next district attorney, aiming to unseat three-term incumbent Jeff Rosen with an aggressive reform platform to reduce severity of criminal prosecutions and increase investigations of police.
Khan is currently working in the county’s Alternate Defender’s Office and has distinguished himself as a vocal critic of Rosen, aligning himself with a raft of local civilrights and social-justice groups in recent years. With positions that mirror that of hard-charging reform candidates who have taken DA’s offices in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, his campaign marks the first re-election challenge to Rosen, who will have been in office for 12 years by the time Election Day rolls around in 2022.
“I’m running for district attorney to tell the truth about, and undo, systemic racism that runs in our county and mass incarceration in all its forms,” Khan said in an interview before announcing his campaign today.
His campaign to lead the state’s second-largest district attorney’s office was galvanized by experiences at the downtown San Jose demonstrations last summer protesting the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he said.
“When this moment last summer arose, it became very clear to me in the community, in the streets, on Zoom calls, that there was a call to service to meet this moment, to effect real, meaningful systems change,” Khan said. “I think the community is ripe and ready for the reforms that I want to implement.”
The path to defeating Rosen, who ousted his own boss in 2010 and has run unopposed in two elections since, will be formidable. With the extensive stable of political support expected of a long-term incumbent — including backing from criminal-justice reform figures — he has both the benefit of incumbency and a notable fundraising edge at the outset of the race. Rosen formally announced Thursday that he is running for re-election.
In a fundraising email sent out in mid-June, Rosen indicated that he was anticipating his first contested re-election and sought to distinguish himself from prospective challengers.
“I may have opponents from the political extremes of the far left or the far right,” Rosen wrote in the signed email. “That’s because, even though it’s clear that a measured and balanced approach is the most effective way to promote justice, equity, and public safety, the extremists are not interested in supporting any reforms that prove their highly partisan views wrong.”
Though Rosen didn’t mention Khan by name, the deputy pub
lic defender said he wants to redirect thinking about prosecutions of people whose crimes stem primarily from poverty, substance abuse, mental illness and trauma.
Those issues “are not being addressed by our jails and our prisons and arguably are being exacerbated,” Khan said. “What have we done as a community, as a DA’s office and as a system to ensure that when that person returns to our community, that they are whole and ready to comport with the law and not have to resort to criminal behavior? Ultimately when we frame things that way, we’re cultivating sustainable public safety as opposed to putting Band-Aids on these wounds in our community.”
Khan also argued his ideas about criminal justice are not as far outside the mainstream as Rosen appeared to suggest. There is an “appetite in the community” for wholesale reform, he said, citing local support for Proposition 57, which expanded parole eligibility and transferred authority from prosecutors to judges for deciding when children are tried as adults and won with 70% approval from Santa Clara County voters.
Khan has already lined up notable support, including from LaDoris Cordell, a retired county judge and former San Jose police auditor. Cordell stressed that her endorsement is not a repudiation of Rosen, but born from her feeling that Khan is the best candidate to corral what she called a generational inclination by the prosecutor’s office to charge people aggressively, often with the goal of leveraging plea agreements.
“The changes that Jeff has made, they’re good. It is still my belief that the mindset of overcharging, and filing charges against people of color, I don’t think that mentality has changed at all,” Cordell said. “It is past time in my view to see if we can bring a change in attitude, in the whole mentality of what it means to be a prosecutor, and deciding who gets charged with what.”
Khan’s campaign follows those of other agenda-shaking candidates in California. In San Francisco, former public defender Chesa Boudin was elected district attorney in 2019 with a transformative agenda to change punitive prosecutorial practices. George Gascón, the former San Francisco police chief and Boudin’s predecessor in the DA’s office, was elected to run the Los Angeles County DA’s office with pledges to reform the criminal-legal system and reduce incarceration rates.
While Khan’s background as a public defender matches that of Boudin, his task of unseating an incumbent is similar to that of Gascón, who defeated Jackie Lacey in part by scrutinizing her alliances with law enforcement and inclination against prosecuting officers in controversial police force cases.
Khan has similarly criticized Rosen for not filing charges against any San Jose officers for 19 police killings by the department between 2015 and 2020 — several of which yielded substantial city settlements, and at least one that led to a federal civil jury verdict finding officers liable for excessive force in a fatal shooting.
“If there is evidence that a police officer unlawfully killed a human being in our community, we’re going to hold them accountable and prosecute them accordingly,” Khan said in an interview. “Only when police officers are prosecuted for that unlawful behavior will we see Black lives actually matter in our community, and will we see the trust of our community restored when it comes to law enforcement, especially among our communities of color.”
Boudin and Gascón’s campaigns may also be a harbinger of the resistance Khan might face from police departments, police unions, and even within the DA’s office. Both have faced relentless attacks from those groups, and now face recall campaigns.
“I’m not naïve to the resistance that’s going to come,” Khan said, “but I’m primarily focused on … the very real needs of our community members, especially those who are people of color living on the margins in our county.”
A South Bay native and San Jose High School alum, Khan has deep ties to the area, attending UC Berkeley and UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco before working in the public defender’s office for 13 years. He is currently raising his two young sons near where he grew up in San Jose.
“I was born and raised here. I know this city. I know this community,” he said.
Raj Jayadev, co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a social-justice and police watchdog group, said Khan’s local roots and vocal activism are vital assets to his campaign — which, Jayadev added, is taking place in “the most malleable, volatile and dynamic time I’ve ever seen in terms of reimagining justice and safety and interrogating systemic racism.”
“He has seen the pain of how prosecutorial discretion has caged people, broken up families, and decimated Black and Brown families,” he said.