district attorney an opportunity to come back and essentially answer these questions or discuss them further. and i think we'll have to do some more diging in terms of these numbers and staffing levels and so forth, but the notion of "court appearances." just so i understand it right, it's a truism that every time the district attorney appears in court, it doesn't mean that the public defender will appear in court because there are other defense attorneys, correct? >> that is correct. >> but every. >> on the [phra-eurpblts/] of cases the way it's staffed. one courtroom or one department, there is one district attorney assigned and sometimes one public defender.

> >> so none of those things are calculated -- let me give you another example. i'm murder case scheduled to go to trial in two weeks. the case i handled, i have made maybe eight or nine court appearances on that case and obviously once the case goes to trial i will be in court for about a month. that is indistinguishable under the district attorney's algorithm. you can't extrapolate that have i only 52% of the workload because the court events are more or less. i mean, i swear i have never heard of court events being used. when i talk to the people at the court management system, i asked them the same thing and apparently it was a practice that was started by --

>> going forward, every time you are in trial the district attorney is with you. i assume there might be slightvarianations, variations, but the complexities are the same? >> when you say the complexity of the case that the district attorney front-loads more than we do. when we went through this with the controller, they wanted to make sure our caseloads reflected the work that we are actually doing. they held focus groups and figured out by survey how many

hours -- they actually had us keep time sheets for about two months and they figured out the standard amount of time that is required for the standard deviation and figure out the president bush number. if you are handling 20 level 1 cases and 10 level 2 cases and two homicide cases you will be overloaded. so it's just a very commonsense way model. i would be happy to share what the controller did for us with the district attorney. that is why i am here. i told the district attorney that the reason i fell compelled to be here is because he is extrapolating what our caseloads are. he is saying well the public defender's office is overstaffed and therefore, they

don't need as much staff as they have, but we need more staff. again, i don't want to get into the back and forth. i'm not here for that, but i'm concerned when there are really inaccurate statements being made when we have the science to to prove it. >> when you are in case with the d.a. and say the complexity is the same, maybe variance on both sides sometimes. but similarly, couldn't you say you are already saying that when a district attorney is in court without you there, those are court events, but a lot of times -- i don't want to paraphase, but someone dismissive they could be minor events. but on the flipside, couldn't they be major events when you are not defending them and for the events that you are not there and the district attorney is there, you would be able to extrapolate one way or another and maybe we could talk about how to do it an average of time spent or how serious those masters matters are? is that

correct? >> if we say that you as supervisors only get time for in chambers and that is all. we would not accurately gauge your workload. so the only way to determine the actual numbers of hours worked on a case is to look at the number of hours that it takes to work on the case and not by looking at simply how many times you showed up to court on a case? and the reality is that just because you show up in court on a case 20 times doesn't mean that you worked 20 times as hard as the person who showed up one day. i'm just saying it's not an accurate way to predict anything. what does showing up to court predict other than showing up to court? if you want it say that the district attorney 's showed up this many

times and the public defenders showed up this many times that is all it shows and nothing more. >> is it not a proxy for how many hours are spent? i mean if you show up in a homicide case ten times for the district attorney isn't that a proxy saying that we spent x number of hours? >> no, because you could spend ten court appearances going to court on a trespass and that is the problem with the system. when i talked to the court management system, they just -- they is what they said. they said using court events doesn't distinguish between all the different types of cases that the department handles. and everybody knows, like, for example in our case system, we have 250 hours a year allocated for a murder case. for a drug case, we have like 20 hours allocated.

why? because a drug case doesn't require the kind of preparation, the kind of witness investigation that is required in a murder case. that probably should be obvious, but by looking at the number of court events, there is no way you could distinguish between a homicide case or a misdemeanor case based on the number of court appearances. >> okay. thank you. >> supervisor mar. >> chair farrell i wanted to hear d.a. gascon's responses. it seems our public defender has given us a lot of information about sometimes challenging what was presented and it's clear that your

serious felonies take quite a bit more time. i also wanted to say that to our public defender that our district attorney also says their office goes above and beyond the court events workload and handle victim witness assistance, victim compensation, witness relocation, criminal investigations and child and adult advocacy and i wonder if you could that what additional responsibilities your office handles? >> just to be clear, i am not here to tell the district attorney or suggest how he should count his workload. he is free to count his workload any way he wants if he wants to use court events, i wouldn't do it that way, but he is freeh to free to do that. all i'm saying it's wrong for him to extrapolate his court events to our court events because as far as i'm concerned,

one has nothing to do with the other. we have weighted caseloads indicated in the report and we published them online. as you can see, those levels were established by the controller's office, not by us. so you have an objective entity that based on the science figures out the number of hours you are spending on cases and plug the numbers in and that is how we arrive at the total number of cash s. >> could you respond to duties above that?

>> comparing our two practices is like apples and oranges. what is the big difference? we have clients. we have actually people that we have to meet with and that we have the obligation to communicate with and respond to their needs. the district attorney doesn't have to do that. we have to drive to san bruno county jail to meet with many of our clients. the district attorney doesn't have to do that. they meet with witnesss and crime victims burb it's a different relationship. my whole point is that you

can't extrapolate by our workload by looking at this crazy thing called court events. to me it's just mind-boggling he has done that. the d.a. has more responsibilitis and that is why his budget is nearly twice our budget and they get tons more grants. that is life. if i wanted to change that i wouldn't become a prosecutor. the bottom line is that you cannot compare our workloads to each other unless you do a case-weighted study. and if i were in your shoes and making the decision whether to 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