New San Francisco DA revokes 30 drug case plea deals made by recalled predecessor

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins (D) announced on Wednesday that she has revoked 30 plea offers for drug cases made by her predecessor, who was recalled from office.

Former District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D) was ousted in a recall election in June, a rebuke of the progressive policies that he pushed like ending cash bail and offering defendants the opportunity to enter a rehabilitation program instead of prison. 

Jenkins’s office said in a news release that one of the plea offers that she took back was for a case in which a defendant had six open cases for dealing fentanyl and was arrested with more than 100 grams of the drug. 

The release says the individual was referred to the city’s Community Justice Center, a collaborative court program that focuses on rehabilitation instead of punishment, more than five times despite not completing the center’s requirements. They were offered a single misdemeanor to settle all six cases. 

The district attorney’s office will now seek a felony charge that includes jail time.

“Since 2020, nearly 1,500 people have died of drug overdose in part because dealers have been allowed to operate with impunity,” Jenkins said in the release.

“The lethality of fentanyl presents a different challenge, and we must immediately change course, so we can save lives and hold people accountable for the havoc they are wreaking in our communities like the Tenderloin and South of Market.” 

San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D) appointed Jenkins, a more moderate public prosecutor, to the role to complete Boudin’s term last month. 

Wednesday’s release says the office’s new policy will prevent drug dealers arrested with more than five grams of drugs from being referred to the center. 

Jenkins ordered a review of open narcotics sale cases, which found that over half of the more than 150 open cases involved the sale of fentanyl. 

The release states that Boudin’s office did not obtain any convictions for dealing fentanyl in all of 2021, while former District Attorney George Gascon (D) oversaw at least 90 in 2018. The San Francisco Standard reported that fentanyl killed nearly 500 people in the city last year.