Public defenders challenge judges, draw backlash
When four San Francisco deputy public defenders decided to take on four Superior Court judges in the June election, they stirred up a storm of opposition in the political and legal community.
The incumbents — Judges Curtis Karnow, Jeffrey Ross, Cynthia Ming-mei Lee and Andrew Cheng — have won endorsements from Gov. Jerry Brown and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. Also from the San Francis-
co Democratic County Central Committee and San Francisco Young Democrats, local Democratic legislators and the four leading candidates for mayor.
The judges are, as their opponents repeatedly point out, all appointees of Republican governors. All four, as it turns out, are also registered Democrats.
The California Judges Association supports the four judges. So do all 46 of their Superior Court colleagues, along with 30 past presidents of the Bar Association of San Francisco. State Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a Brown appointee, says that challenging “dedicated and highly qualified judges” just because of their appointing governor’s party affiliation is “crass political opportunism.”
And J. Anthony Kline, a Brown-appointed presiding justice of the state appeals court in San Francisco, writes that the challengers’ campaign “threatens to undermine the independence and integrity of one of the finest superior courts in this state.”
Niki Solis, who is seeking to unseat Ross, said she isn’t surprised by the reaction to the challengers.
“Certainly, judges have circled the wagons and supported each other. That’s to be expected,” said Solis, who has spent 21 years in the public defender’s office, which represents criminal defendants who can’t afford their own lawyers. But “it’s not the lawyers who get to decide, not the governor, not the judges, not the Bar Association. It’s the voters.”
Kwixuan Maloof, who has been with the defender’s office for 17 years and is now a lead attorney in its homicide unit, said he and his colleagues are being unfairly accused of attacking the judiciary.
“I never thought democracy was an attack,” said Maloof, who is running against Lee. “We’re running because the system is failing, failing our people.”
Also opposing Lee is Elizabeth Zareh, an attorney and San Francisco property assessment commissioner who is not part of the public defenders’
campaign. The other deputy public defenders are Maria Evangelista, who is running against Karnow, and Phoenix Streets, who is taking on Cheng.
The election is June 5. Superior Court judges, appointed for six-year terms, are usually re-elected automatically and are not even listed on the ballot if they have no challengers. They are rarely challenged and even less often unseated.
One of the few exceptions happened in 2008, when Gerardo Sandoval, a San Francisco supervisor forced off the board by term limits, ran for Superior Court and defeated Judge Thomas Mellon, a 1994 appointee of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. Mellon lost despite having been endorsed by much of the local and state judiciary.
Two years later, another San Francisco judge, Richard Ulmer, narrowly defeated challenger Michael Nava, a gay Latino attorney whose campaign themes were similar to those being aired this year — he said he would add diversity to the bench, and pointed out that Ulmer had been appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A now retired San Francisco judge, Donna Hitchens, took office by defeating an incumbent in 1990. But there appears to be no previous example, at least locally and perhaps statewide, of a judicial campaign by multiple candidates who come from the same government office. Their boss, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, says he supports their campaign.
Another unusual feature is that the challengers, for the most part, are directing their criticism at the judicial system — and its failure to alleviate economic and racial injustice — rather than at at their individual opponents.
As Evangelista put it in a recent writing, “If you believe our current system is working fine for all San Franciscans, then vote for the status quo and the Republican-appointed judges.” San Francisco, she contended in an interview, “needs judges that match their political views.”
To an incumbent judge like Cheng, the challengers are “in essence running for legislator, not judge.”
While legislators pledge to carry out the will of the people, he said, judges are bound to follow the law, which includes having “the courage on occasion to make decisions that are unpopular.”
“This is a very compassionate court,” said Cheng, a former federal prosecutor and lifelong Democrat who was appointed to the bench by Schwarzenegger in 2009. He cited San Francisco’s special judicial systems for veterans, truants and drug offenders, and a bench that includes 21 people of color among its 50 judges.
Karnow, a 2005 Schwarzenegger appointee, didn’t win many friends in the city’s tenant community later that year when he struck down a San Francisco ordinance that protected renters from eviction for refusing to accept significant changes in the terms of their tenancy, such as a ban on subletting the apartment to someone else. He ruled that it conflicted with state law.
But Karnow was also the judge whose rulings in 2015 and 2016 saved San Francisco City College from losing its accreditation and possibly shutting down. He has headed the court’s complex litigation department and written reference books for litigators.
Evangelista, his opponent, is the child of farmworkers from Mexico and a 14-year veteran of the public defender’s office.
Lee, whom Maloof and Zareh are challenging, is a 1998 appointee of Wilson. In 2012, her colleagues elected her to a two-year term as the court’s presiding judge, the only Asian American woman to hold that position. She also founded the city’s Veterans Court and, as a San Francisco deputy district attorney, helped to establish a drug court for juveniles.
Cheng issued a ruling in 2016 that allowed veterans groups, over the city’s objections, to remain in the War Memorial Veterans Building for little or no rent. Last year, he imposed a record $3.5 million fine on a landlady after a jury found she had illegally evicted a family from their home of 21 years.
His opponent, Streets, is a former Legal Aid attorney who has worked in the public defender’s office for 18 years.
Ross was appointed by Schwarzenegger in 2009 after 34 years of law practice, 24 of them as a criminal defense attorney. He presides over criminal cases but also chairs the Treatment Court Committee, which seeks alternatives to criminal sentencing for young adults, drug users or others seeking treatment.
Solis, his opponent, said she would bring to the bench “my perspective as a mom and a person of color and a homeowner and a lesbian.”