spend another $2 million next year on prosecutors or defenders, you know, then i would look to see what kind of cases are these? how many hours are they going to take? because what you are going to be effectively doing is reduction the case load of prosecutors which was once 30 to 18 to probably eight or nine cases a prosecutor. and if that is what the goal is, i would approve the supplemental. but if that is not what the goal is and you don't want attorneys with part-time caseloads working full-time, you know, i would consider at least having the data before you decide. >> okay. thank you to our public defender. at this point i think it's only fair to bring up our district attorney gascon to discuss a few of the items brought up. >> yes, first of all i want to thank the public defender for a very good presentation and i can see why the public defender has done so well for the last

decade in front of this body. the reality is that court events are the only unbiased count that we have today, that we can go to see how many times a lawyer walks into the courtroom? as i indicated in my earlier presentation, there is a wide variety of court events and certainly the complexity of the events vary from case to case, but a reality i must underline is that every time that a public defender shows up in the courtroom, there is a district attorney off and on the other side. however, every time that the district attorney is in the courtroom doesn't necessarily mean a public defender is going to be on the other side. let me illustrate for you, for instance in this chart that i have here, you can see going back to 2007. all the way to 2012. and you can see the proportionality of work done by the public defender's office in

that that is done by private defense. in 2007 the public defend every was almost 68% of the workload. if you fast-forward all the way down to 2012, that workload has come down to 53%. meaning that other people are handling this work. not the public defender's office. however, in the prosecute's side, we continue to handle the work. i also want to correct a little concerning the number of attorneys that we have assigned to our misdemeanor unit. we have nine attorneys assigned to our general misdemeanor unit. it is true that we're seeing a greater number of acquittals in cases and, by the way, i know this is a minor distinction, but i heard the public defender talking about people being tried that are innocent. that guilty verdict doesn't necessarily equate to someone being innocent.

it simply means that we in the prosecution were unable to meet our burden of proof in front of a jury. the reality is that we're experiencing a decrease in our conviction rate directly related to the workload where attorneys don't have sufficient time to handle the cases. and frankly, while i am responsible for the public safety of the community and my goal is to provide the best possible cases that we can in order to ensure public safety, the public defender has a very narrow responsibility and one that is very, very important. and that is to aggressively defend, regardless of whether the individual commited a crime or not. we're seeing in many cases before we get to our victim to prepare for the cases, the victim has already been contacted by the public defender's office. we're seeing cases where victims are told, if you

cooperate this in case, this could lead to the separation of your family and impact whether your husband or boyfriend may be deported from the country. things that i find quite frankly disturbing. the public defender is very correct in saying that our conviction rate is much lower than in neighboring counties. i have to tell you recentry i was at a meeting with the make it district attorneys and were discussing some of of the problems and these are things that we see in our office day in and day out. i decent don't blame the public defender for doing their job. constitutionally, that is what they do. our system is an adversarial system and it works best when

we are appropriate le staffed and funded. when i'm talking about court events. if you are dealing with a complex homicide case, that requires many hours to prepare, i assure you that we will have to play with the same level and i would argue that we place a greater level of effort because we're the ones that work in the courtroom with the burden of proof. under our system, the defense only have to show there is a reasonable doubt that the allegations that are being proposed by the prosecution did not occur as they are being proposed. on the other hand we have to go

beyond a reasonable doubt to con coincidence convince a jury that it did occur. i would have to tell you most complex cases are the cases that you have people practicing medicine without a license and those involved with mortgage fraud schemes. those cases while there may be a minimum number of court events i can tell you there are hundreds and hundreds of hours invested in these cases and the public defender isn't there to deal with the cases. i choose to use court event because court events that neither office can cook. there are certain numbers that are there and done by the court and through the court's management system. we do not control the number of court events shown in the system. when a case is complex for the

public defender, it's equally complex for the prosecution. but when you look at the chart here, you can see that increasingly, we're dealing with very complex cases where the public defender is not here. i'm not here to talk about the historical funding. mr. dachi and i have discussed this presentation and we have frankly agreed to disagree and we work well together and respect one another and i think san franciscans are very fortunate to have the quality of representation that they have in the public defender. if i were a criminal defendant and i was indigent, i would want nobody else but jeff dachi to defend me, but i'm not here to talk about that. i'm here to talk about how we enhance public safety in this community and we cannot do so if you continue to understaff our district attorney's office

and certainly in the area of domestic violence we have seen the consequences and i think domestic violence is really important to look at. because this is an area where we're often talking about people's lives. and not only are we talking about the victim, and the offender,, but we're talking about entire families. we're talking about communities. the reality is that if i were to walk into a prison system today, almost everyone of those individuals that is there was raised in a home where at some point there was violence in the home. this is an epidemic in our country and we have an obligation to do something about it. you have an opportunity today to show your support for doing what is right. and what is right is to staff this unit appropriately, so that we increase our conviction rate, so that people have consequences for bad behavior. and we continue on the road to recovery when dealing with domestic violence. i thank you very much for your attention. unless you have another questions, i would just ask for your support. >> president chiu? >> thank you, mr. chair.

i do have a couple of follow-up questions and i appreciate this dialogue, because obviously there is a lot of data that we're looking at. and i think it's important for both sides to be able to review the data and get us your feedback. i have given to your staff a couple of slides from mr. odachi's presentation and i just wanted to make sure we're talking about the right thing. my sense is that we're talking apples-to-oranges. what i heard you say first of all in the d.a.'s office, you have

nine. >> that is correct. we have nine. >> in this particular slide it's addressed that the public defenders office has 60 cases per criminal attorney and the district attorney has 30. are we comparing apples-to-oranges? i know when i was in the d.a.'s office it was in the hundreds and i'm wondering what that number is >> it's in the hundreds and i will go through this. i don't have that information here, but i think we need to get back to reality here. okay? every time that ere there is a council case, there will be a district attorney. that not necessarily the case for the public defender. so i don't know how you mathematically say that the public defender's office handles more. that is mathematically

impossible. we're there 100% of the time and they are there 50% of the time in 2012. i could get you the actual workload analysis for the misdemeanor unit. i don't have that with me today. >> i just wanted to ask two questions about that slide, which is a depiction from the public defender's office of the outcome of various cases. it would show that your office has had very few guilty verdicts after case goes to trial, but one thing to point out when it refers to "mixed verdicts." that refers to cases that were multiple trials presented to a jury and you received guilty convictions, meaning that a defendant is going jail, going prison because of those guilty pleas right? >> frankly, i'm a little confused when i see the math here. i have noticed in the public defender's office, they will

count a victory if there is a non-guilty verdict on one count. that would be like having two baseball teams going for the world series, winning the games and actually becoming the world series champion and the other team saying well, i scored more runs during the season. the reality is that the one who wins the series is the one who wins the series at the end. it's not uncommon for us to charge multiple counts in a case and it's not uncommon for a verdict to come back where there would be a not guilty on some of those counts, but nevertheless they would be found guilty and they will go to prison. they will go to jail or face the consequences of a conviction. so if we're counting count, that is a very inaccurate way of assessing the outcome of a trial. because you can have somebody that walked into a trial with five counts against him.

and they get found guilty one, but they go to prison for life. i would say that is a win fore for the production. prosecution. i hate to use the terms" win and lose," because i don't believe that is the only metric or and this doesn't necessarily reflect the total outcome of the case. >> the last point i want to make and really on the same chart is the suggestion that the conviction we all agree conviction rates in the 50s and

60s, 70s is in the as high as we want it to be. mr. adachi has suggested that conclusion is that your office should pull back on moving forward on these cases. i wonder if we should be drawing the opposite conclusion that again, we need to spend more resources to ensure that for those cases that are prosecuted as they should be, but with enough resources to have a fair set of facts to present to juries? i want to get your perspective on that. >> absolutely, that is the problem. i think the outcome you often see in cases here, you see in the d.a.'s office, it's understaffed and we do not have the resources to deal with the workload the way that many other countis do. if i could call your attention, i think i have a chart here somewhere. let me see if i can get that. do we have the one about the historical funding for the d.a.'s office? in your packet, a table was put

together that took nearly over a decade approach to the funding of the district attorney's office and the criminal justice system in this county and compared to other counties in california. when you look at the chart, you see that the public defender's office was very well-funded and much more so than other public defenders offices. the d.a.'s office had less funding available than ten years before. if you look at staffing levels from 2000-2001 to where we are today we have gone from $270 to where we are now at $242. so you can see that our staffing levels have been reduced

significantly. at same time, our workload and the complexity of workload hasn't necessarily gone down. so i think you are absolutely right. that one way and certainly a way that we believe to look at these numbers, you are looking at a district attorney's office that has been historically underfunded and at a breaking point and i don't believe it's good for public safety. i believe that wes a community have an obligation to make sure that people that get legally arrested and charged, because they committed a crime, that they face the consequences and we should not be celebrating when our conviction rate is as low as it is, when people that should have been convicted were not, because unfortunately there were not enough resources to conduct the prosecution in the proper way. >> the last comment i want to join in the compliments to the public defender for ensuring that we have full and complete

defense. from my perspective, i think you have done a great job of that and i do agree with our d.a. that if one is charged with a crime in this city, your office does a great job of that, from my perspective. what i want to ensure is that we have a balance in the courtroom. and that justice and truth play out and that both offices are equally prepared for these cases. >> thank you, mr. president. we're only asking for an equitable level of resources. we do not want to be o staffed and certainly don't want to be in the place that the public defender's office is understaffed. i'm a strong advocate that the offices are properly staffed.

>> supervisor mar. >> i would just like to ask if our public defender wants to respond? >> just very briefly. just to clarify a couple of points here. when supervisor chiu asked about the funding, or the staffing level of the district attorney's investors the public defender's office. this is actually an undercount, because both offices, both the district attorney and public defender use what is called "volunteer attorneys." and i don't know if this was in practice when you were there, but these tomorrows handle full-time caseloads to get trial experience. the district attorney has many more than we do, but that is what accounts for the total number of bodis that are handling cases. if you have a body working full-time, we count that as a lawyer. we haven't been able to hire an

attorney for the last year because of funding issues related to our own budget. to the extent we can, we have tried to use volunteer attorneys to fill that gap. i'm sure that the district attorney is referring to the ftes, the full-time positions he has dedicated for that purpose. the chart here, let me make it perfectly clear, this is not guilty there, this means a complete acquittal of all charges. an acquittalis only when you get across the board not guilty. with respect to, we go to the hung juries, where a jury can't make a decision and guilty is where they are convicted of all the charges. so i want to be clear that is what these represent.

when you see 54% of your cases, juries saying they are not guilty of that crime, that should at least require that you take pause and say should we have prosecuted that case? if the answer is no, they should not be trying that case. you could argue that domestic violence cases we should try every case, but again, do we have the resources to do that in each and every case? and supervisor chiu, you also asked about the question of whether we should be prosecuting more cases by virtue of the fact that there is a low conviction rate in san francisco? and again, it depends on who you are prosecuting. if you are prosecuting -- if you are going to say every one of these people who san

francisco juries found not guilty, 90% of the time in 2009, 32% of the time in 2010, 46% of the time in 2011 and 2012, 54, was completely wrong. they must have slept through the trial. then i guess you can make that conclusion. but the reality is that if you are getting these kinds of results, you should seriously question the outcomes. one of the biggest changes that we now have a new presiding judge in department 17, where all the cases go through and in the one month he has been there managed to settle 30-40% more misdemeanor cases than his predecessor. so we're expecting a reduction because of that. thank you. >> thank you very much. any other questions? >> let me just try to be

really brief. i know as supervisors farrell and avalos mentioned this is a precursor to more budget discussion on staffing. i wanted to say to our district attorney mr. gascon, a appreciate the emotion of the audio that you started with and for the greatest work that has been done and the one thing left out is the staffing of the victim witness advocates within the d.a.'s office, which i am strongly supportive of and the 440 victims and i wanted to drill down because i that the data being used is misleading.

it's implying that court events are the way that you determine how much work is determined by the office and i think the public defender's breaking down of case times 1-5 and weighing the amount of work done is a much more valuable way to look at the amount of work that is done. so my hope is that we get the data of the type of 1-5 cases. for the district attorney's office, i think getting to data that is really useful, so that we could see what the needs of your office is really important. i did feel that some of the slides and the use of the court events was [ph*-eugs/] leading to note if you could respond to that. >> i could. the court events are the only

information that we have that could not be manipulated. if you want to go back for information that looks more favorable, i could do that. we tried to take universal data that we have available today. it's not necessary ily saying it's great, but to take that data and i think most reasonably people will say understanding that a court event could be anywhere from a 30-second standing in front of a judge to hours' of litigation, i don't think it's unreasonable to say that you can extrapolate for that that

is indicative of the total workload and especially if you consider and you understand the nature of the work, and you understand that actually the most complex cases the district attorney's office handles are never represented by the public defender, like cases on the special prosecution side. yet we do not intend to inflate those numbers by saying that we're spending in this particular white-collar crime case thousands of hours when we know that would not be representative of many of the other work that we do. court events represent how many times a lawyer is in front of the judge, regardless of the time. any time that there is a public defender there, there is going to be a district attorney. if you have a complex case for the public defender, you have a complex case for the district attorney. and i would argue, and i know

mr. mar, you are an attorney and it's much more difficult to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, then it is to simply show that there may be a reasonable doubt. so while i appreciate the work that the public defender is trying to do and probably getting to what eventually be to where we should all be, that number cannot come either office, but that number needs to come from an impartial third party, the court or somebody else and that is not what we have today. so i understand your concern, but i hope you look at this from a plain look at these things and that you look at it for what it is. if there is a court event, and it's a criminal case, the d.a. is going to be there. > >> okay. thank you. d.a. gascon, unless is pertaining to this item, this is for future discussion --

:it's about caseload. there is a report that ben rosenthal sent with all the data created by the court management system, all of those numbers state the actual case loads for our offices. one report for us and one report for the district attorney and i believe it was sent to the supervisors y esterday by ben rosenfield. >> okay. thank you very much. colleagues any other question okay, with that, i would like to turn to our budget and legislative analyst for this their report. >> mr. chairman, members of the committee, contrary to the statement that -- "somewhat

arbitrary," nothing could be further from the truth and our recommendations were based on a careful and detailed analysis of the documentation and the data. i would like to briefly summarize our report and to make comments. >> mr. chairman, members of the committee, deb radio newman from the budget analyst's office. i just wanted to take a moment at the beginning. and respond to questions raised. supervisor chiu you asked about the caseload data for the district attorney of an average caseload of 30 per attorney and where that number came from. if you look at table 3 on our report 11, actually based on the information provided by the district attorney, there show and average caseload per attorney, this is for the

domestic violence division, of those cases assigned to trial, it shows 30 caseload per attorney average. and again, this is based -- it does show that is going up and that those are possibly the numbers that were being used there. >> through the chair, a clarification, i wasn't studenting that number, but i was disputeing 60 cases from the public defender's misdemeanor caseload versus the 30. i think that is comparing apples to oranges and the appropriate comparison would be 60 cases per criminal defense attorney in the misdemeanor unit on the public deferreders side versus a couple hundred on the district attorney's side. that is what i was really getting it. >> this does not show anything for the public defender, nor talk about overall caseload for the department. it's just focusing on the domestic violence cases. i would also like to re