Brooke Jenkins (born 1981/1982) is an American lawyer serving as the 30th
District Attorney of San Francisco
The San Francisco District Attorney's Office is the legal agency charged with prosecuting crimes in the City and County of San Francisco, California.
The current district attorney is Brooke Jenkins. Occupants of this office have gone on to highe ...
. On July 8, 2022, Jenkins was appointed interim district attorney by Mayor
London Breed
London Nicole Breed (born August 11, 1974) is an American politician who is the 45th and current mayor of the City and County of San Francisco. She was supervisor for District 5 and was president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Board ...
following the successful
recall
Recall may refer to:
* Recall (bugle call), a signal to stop
* Recall (information retrieval), a statistical measure
* ''ReCALL'' (journal), an academic journal about computer-assisted language learning
* Recall (memory)
* ''Recall'' (Overwatch ...
of
Chesa Boudin
Chesa Boudin (, ; born August 21, 1980) is an American lawyer who served as the 29th San Francisco District Attorney's Office, District Attorney of San Francisco from January 8, 2020 to July 8, 2022. He is a member of the Democratic Party (United ...
, for which she actively campaigned for. She was
elected Elected may refer to:
* "Elected" (song), by Alice Cooper, 1973
* ''Elected'' (EP), by Ayreon, 2008
*The Elected, an American indie rock band
See also
*Election
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population ...
in her own right to fill the unexpired term the following November.
Early life and education
Jenkins grew up in
Union City, California
Union City is a city in the San Francisco Bay Area in Alameda County, California, United States, located approximately south of Oakland, from San Francisco, and north of San Jose. Incorporated in 1959, combining the communities of Alvarad ...
.
She was raised by her mother because shortly after being born, her father had to leave the country due to his student visa status.
Her father is from
El Salvador
El Salvador (; , meaning " The Saviour"), officially the Republic of El Salvador ( es, República de El Salvador), is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south b ...
.
She received a
Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...
from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
and a
Juris Doctor
The Juris Doctor (J.D. or JD), also known as Doctor of Jurisprudence (J.D., JD, D.Jur., or DJur), is a graduate-entry professional degree in law
and one of several Doctor of Law degrees. The J.D. is the standard degree obtained to practice law ...
from the
University of Chicago Law School
The University of Chicago Law School is the law school of the University of Chicago, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It is consistently ranked among the best and most prestigious law schools in the world, and has many dist ...
.
Career
Jenkins previously worked in
corporate law.
Jenkins’ clients included domestic automakers and foreign car parts manufacturers, including Honda and Takata. Her firm, Bowman and Brooke, was named "Law360’s 2018 Automotive Groups of the Year".
Jenkins worked in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office from 2014 to 2021,
where she was former lead
hate crimes
A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership (or perceived membership) of a certain social group or racial demograph ...
prosecutor.
She faced controversy for ignoring the husband of a victim's family's wishes by insisting on trying to send Daniel Gudino, a mentally ill man, to prison rather than agreeing he was insane and should go to a hospital. A jury had hung 7-5 in favor of finding him insane after three experts deemed Gudino insane. The District Attorney ultimately decided to stipulate to insanity in accordance with the victim's family's wishes. She resigned in October 2021 to support the
recall campaign against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Mayor London Breed announced on July 7, 2022 the appointment of Jenkins to serve in the interim until an election is held on November 8, 2022 to elect a District Attorney to serve the rest of Boudin's term through 2023.
She was sworn into office on July 8.
Between her appointment and August 2022, Jenkins instituted policies such as allowing her attorneys to seek gang enhancements; allowing the conditional prosecution of minors as adults, and; making it so drug dealers are ineligible for community courts.
Jenkins is running for election in
November 2022 to serve the remainder of Boudin's term through 2023 along with Joe Alioto Veronese, a civil rights attorney and grandson of former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto and John Hamasaki, a criminal defense attorney and Police Commissioner known for his vocal criticism of the police.
Jenkins been paid six figures by the nonprofit, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which shares a name and an office with the Chesa Boudin recall campaign. Jenkins had not previously disclosed these payments. In October 2022, a complaint was filed with San Francisco's Ethics Commission and California's Fair Political Practices Commission accusing Jenkins of failing to register as a campaign consultant. The complaint alleged that the $153,000 salary Jenkins received from the nonprofit, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, was intended for partisan purposes.
It was revealed in October of 2022 by reporter Joe Eskenazi that just before leaving the District Attorney's Office, Jenkins had sent sensitive files, including a
RAP sheet
A criminal record, police record, or colloquially RAP sheet (Record of Arrests and Prosecutions) is a record of a person's criminal history. The information included in a criminal record and the existence of a criminal record varies between coun ...
, from the District Attorney office to Assistant District Attorney Don DuBain's personal email and used those materials in the campaign to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin. According to former District Attorney Boudin, neither Jenkins nor DuBain had a professional attachment to the case. In California, disseminating a rap sheet to a person who is unauthorized to receive it is a misdemeanor. Jenkins claimed that she accidentally sent the email to DuBain's personal email. Several legal experts dismissed this excuse as insufficient.
On October 13, 2022, retired Superior Court Judge Martha Goldin filed a State Bar complaint against Jenkins, outlining multiple misconduct allegations.
One allegation was focused on a case Jenkins prosecuted in 2014. This conviction in this case was reversed in 2016 by an appellate court that found the Jenkins committed a form of prosecutorial misconduct known as a
Griffin error. The complaint alleges that Jenkins lied in September 2022 when she claimed that she had never been found to have committed misconduct. A second allegation was focused on
witness tampering
Witness tampering is the act of attempting to improperly influence, alter or prevent the testimony of witnesses within criminal or civil proceedings.
Witness tampering and reprisals against witnesses in organized crime cases have been a difficul ...
in a 2019 case in which Jenkins was recorded instructing a child witness on what to say on the witness stand.
Personal life
Jenkins lives in Mission Bay with her husband, two children, and her stepdaughter.
References
1980s births
African-American women lawyers
African-American lawyers
District attorneys in California
Hispanic and Latino American lawyers
Living people
People from Union City, California
Politicians from San Francisco
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of Chicago Law School alumni
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