Under District Attorney Chesa Boudin, criminals turned San Francisco into a veritable scofflaw’s paradise. In June 2022, San Francisco voters booted Boudin from office by a landslide 60 percent to 40 percent margin. Mayor London Breed then appointed University of Chicago law alumna Brooke Jenkins, a prosecutor in the city’s homicide division.
Jenkins proceeded to fire 16 Boudin loyalists, and, in November, prevailed over three rivals with approximately 54 percent of the vote. Boudin will not contend for the job in 2024.
“This week, I was named the founding executive director of Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center,” Boudin explains. “The center will serve as a national research and advocacy hub focused on critical law and policy changes to advance justice in the criminal legal system. We will participate in impact litigation and help to educate the next generation of frontline advocates, policymakers, and thought leaders emerging from the UC Berkeley School of Law.”
The new executive director believes he’s uniquely qualified for the job.
“Both of my biological parents were arrested when I was a baby and spent a combined 62 years in prison. A lifetime of visiting them behind bars, together with the years I spent as a public defender and then an elected prosecutor, taught me how catastrophically California and the nation’s current approach to justice are failing.”
His biological parents were Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, members of the Weather Underground and criminals prone to deadly violence. Chesa’s parents were arrested for their involvement in a 1981 armored car robbery in New York State that claimed the lives of security guard Peter Paige and two police officers, including African American Waverly Brown.
“A masked man stood over him and shot him dead with a 9mm pistol,” explains William Rosenau, in Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group. Officer Edmund O’Grady fell to a bullet from an M16.
Kathy and David named their son Chesa after Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). She was wanted for the murder of New Jersey state patrolman Werner Foerster, “shot dead point blank” in Rosenau’s account. The Weather Underground and M19 Communist Organization aided the BLA as part of a “cop-killing conspiracy.”
Weather Underground stalwarts Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn duly adopted Chesa. In due time he became a facsimile of Kathy’s father, Leonard Boudin, a leftist lawyer who represented Cuba’s Communist dictatorship. Chesa worked for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, but wanted to make a difference in America.
Boudin believes that the United States of America is an oppressive, racist place—except, of course, for his upscale government job and benefits. In Boudin’s view, criminals are victims of the capitalist system and not to blame for their crimes. So Boudin released repeat offenders, declined to prosecute others, and disregarded crime victims. That is his idea of criminal justice reform.
Criminals are also comrades in the revolutionary cause, taking down the system by any means necessary. True to form, Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur, is the hero of Black Lives Matter, the second coming of the Black Liberation Army. If the BLA or BLM ever did anything with which Chesa disagreed, it’s hard to pin it down.
Boudin’s failure to maintain public safety, and his rejection by San Francisco voters, are not a problem for Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.
“Chesa was chosen after a national search and has substantial experience across the criminal justice system,” Chemerinsky claims. “He has thought deeply about the system, and I cannot think of anyone better to create and direct this important center.” If anybody in San Francisco, or across the country, thought Chesa Boudin was the absolute worst, it would be hard to blame them.
Chesa Boudin, the criminal’s best friend, will be educating “the next generation of frontline advocates, policymakers, and thought leaders emerging from the UC Berkeley School of Law.”
Injustice is now inherent in the system. It’s springtime for Boudin and Berkeley.