In San Francisco, a Superior Court judge has fined Public Defender Mano Raju $26,000 for contempt after finding that he ignored a court order to stop rejecting new felony and misdemeanor cases. The ruling came after Raju continued to decline some new cases following a January instruction by Judge Harry Dorfman, according to the court proceedings described by The Associated Press.
Dorfman ordered Raju in January to stop declining cases, but Raju did not comply. This month, Dorfman found Raju in contempt and set another hearing for April, while imposing $1,000 fines for each of 26 cases the judge said were rejected after the January order. Raju told The Associated Press that he plans to appeal and continue declining some new cases.
Raju’s refusal began last May, when he said he started turning away some defendants facing new felony and misdemeanor charges because of a workload that he described as crushing. He tied the strain to increased prosecutions and what he characterized as insufficient staffing for his office. Raju said his team’s caseload was already too heavy to provide what he argued was ethically appropriate representation, and he said he wanted additional attorneys or for the court to reject some of the cases brought by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.
Raju argued that the situation harms both defendants and staff. “Every member of my team could cut their workload in half, and they would still have more than a full-time job,” Raju said to The Associated Press, describing the imbalance he said his attorneys face. At Tuesday’s hearing, he told the judge that the heavy workload affected the quality of representation his office could provide and that it also caused “residual trauma” for his staff, according to the AP report.
Jenkins, who replaced former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, framed the public defender’s decision as a deliberate attempt to disrupt the system. She argued that Raju’s actions were bottlenecking the courthouse and said the public defender’s objective was to cause chaos. “Their objective is to disrupt the system, it’s to cause chaos, it is to bottleneck the courthouse,” Jenkins said in remarks reported by The Associated Press.
The dispute has played out against a backdrop of national and local public defender shortages, but the courtroom conflict between Raju, Jenkins and Dorfman has been unusually contentious. The AP report noted that courts from Oregon to Massachusetts have struggled with too few public defenders, including an Oregon Supreme Court decision in February that will dismiss more than 1,400 cases because of a lack of timely representation. In San Francisco, though, the clash is occurring amid political battles over public safety.
San Francisco politics has sharpened focus on the court system, particularly after voters recalled Boudin in 2022 and elected Mayor Daniel Lurie in 2024 on a promise to restore the city’s image and clean up its streets. Jenkins has increased prosecutions, filing 8,000 felony and misdemeanor cases last year compared with about 5,600 filed in 2021, according to the AP report. Raju’s position also entered a budget fight, with critics suggesting his case refusals were aimed at pressing for resources.
In court, Raju argued that a surge in prosecutions of low-level crimes, along with a growing volume of digital and video evidence requiring review, created an unsustainable workload. He said his attorneys were working extreme hours and cited health impacts, and he accused Jenkins of clogging the courts. Raju also relied on workload studies he said support limits on caseload sizes, and he told the judge that, so far, no one had been left without legal representation because his office coordinated with city-contracted private attorneys when needed. The Bar Association of San Francisco told the judge, according to the AP report, that its attorneys were now at capacity and could not accept new clients.
Judge Dorfman rejected Raju’s claims that the workload was so unmanageable that he could refuse appointments. Dorfman determined that Raju’s office had enough staffing to handle the caseload, and the AP report said he also pointed to supervising public defenders as a possible source of additional capacity. Dorfman also criticized Raju’s office for assigning two attorneys to some felony cases, a practice Raju said was sometimes used for training purposes. Dorfman wrote in a January ruling that the studies Raju referenced were not California law, and at Tuesday’s hearing he said the court could not retreat from its order, the AP report said.